TL;DR
Many people were interested in the numbers from my I will build your prototype experiment, so I figured I would share some of the early information I have. I got about 13,000 page views and around 30 emails of interest. All of this boiled down to 7 potential projects and one well meaning copy cat (they're smart guys - if you're in italy, check 'em out).
The numbers
I was on the HN front-page for about 12 hours, that day I got about 7k page views with another 4k the next day. After the initial spike, I seem to be getting about 40-60 pageviews a day. Here's some info I found interesting about that traffic:
sources
- Search Traffic :: 0.24%
- Referral Traffic :: 69.77%
- Direct Traffic :: 29.96%
referrers
- news.ycombinator.com :: 82.81%
- twitter.com :: 3.68%
- google.com :: 3.33%
- news.ycombinator.org :: 1.20%
US vs International traffic:
- International :: 51%
- US :: 49%
Visits per state
- California :: 1,723
- New York :: 555
- Texas :: 297
- Massachusetts :: 286
- Washington :: 262
- Illinois :: 213
- Florida :: 173
I think the most surprising thing about all of that is that there was actually more traffic internationally than there was locally. I really didn't expect that.
In terms of the interest it generated, I got a lot of traffic on the rest of my site (not included in the above stats) and surprisingly, we got a lot of interest in Typewire as well. I received around 30 emails, some just from people wanting to talk to me, a few with job offers, and the rest were people wanting to talk about me potentially building prototypes for them. After contacting everyone, I've ended up with about 7 that might turn into real work, though I'm still waiting to see wireframes from most of them. Additionally, the post generated a fair amount of interest in Noir and I think it really drummed up some buzz around Clojure.
As I'm waiting to hear back from people, I'm thinking of doing some two week projects for myself. As I figure that out, I'll talk about my progress on here so people can follow along!