Vibesail 0

Originally published as an X Article.

When i started http://vibesail.com of course no one was playing it. Why did I keep on going?

here is a long post:

I just started coding it after seeing Pieter flying game and It and it turned out much cuter than i expected, maybe there was potential… So I had to share it with people! But how?

I started building in public on Twitter: posting videos on my account, commenting with my game link begging for feedback. At the time I had like 200 followers, mostly inactive old friends, so no one really cared or played it. still remember the first dozen likes spread around a half a dozen of posts.

Exhibit number 1: Twitter video with 1 like and 463 views from feb 27th

Exhibit number 2: An hacker news article with 4 upvotes from feb 28th NicolaManzini/status/1895224747962880066

I quickly realized that twitter was not working for me as i had no following and wanted to get some feedback. (SPOILER: it got viral also on twitter a week later but that is another story)

So what does a nerd do after such a failure? post on Hacker News… Of course a vibe-coded sailing game is a piece of news for hackers… Silly me… Anyway you can imagine the results:

Exhibit number 2: An hacker news article with 4 upvotes from feb 28th

Digged into the stats and more than 50 people tried it from Hacker News: they did not like it, did not upvote it, did not comment on it -> The post did not became popular.

Ok, it was not going well. My game is not good enough? Really likely it is not.

Fine then, dead man walking, last resort, the game might be abandoned anyway. I decide to post on reddit. The good old reddit, will my post be seen by someone before it will be inevitably removed?

I muster the courage and I posted to r/sailing. You have to know that it is a subreddit where sail boat owners post pictures of their sail boats, sailors talk about their sailing stories, sailing lovers talk about sailing, sail sails sails and so on, lots of sailing.

Dropping a video-game Video and a link to try it? I was expecting the post to get deleted or directly banned! it is reddit after all.

Exhibit number 3: my reddit post gets 433 upvotes and +50K views from feb 28th

Well it worked! Got my first thousand players form reddit and even more I got a huge amount of good feedback form sailing enthusiasts that were also enthusiastic about my game.

So much good feedback that I had to spend 2 days to rewrite the physics of the game because it was not up to their expectations!

This confirmation form reddit was really important for me at the time because the game had some potential. Now not only in my opinion but also in other peoples opinion! This motivated me to keep going.

Why it worked there? IDK. My guess is that I brought some content they were totally not expecting there (a game), that are really interested in (sailing), easy to use (a link also on mobile) and that they just liked a lot.

Exhibit 4: analytics from feb 28th to march 2nd showing a total of 1k views mostly form reddit.

I realized this sailing game was not interesting for “hackers” (HN) or to people “terminally online” (twitter). It was interesting to people that loved sailing (r/sailing).

“WHAT A SURPRISING DISCOVERY!” you might say. Yeah but it was not really clear to me then. Idk if it is even clear to me now!

Hacker news was totally the wrong place.

Twitter was not the best place to start, maybe not even the best place where to get feedback, but it revealed itself, just a few days later, a great place for building a following, get to know interesting people and totally unexpected at the time: monetization.

So this is the little story of the first little taste of virality that reached vibesail.

Thanks for reading.