Which HN members were able to grow a site from 0 to a Million unique visitors?

This would be a great Quora question. Why don't you go ahead and ask there and post a link here?

I did it with a Horoscopes app on Facebook. I don't own it, my employer does. In October of last year it was at 12,000 users a day, and now it is 1.8 million users a day.

I did it by having a really nice app, really understanding how to grow an app on the Facebook platform, and a combination of black magic and luck.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd do a couple things: try to get into the build-measure-learn loop faster, and once inside BML space try to loop around faster. Second, for funnel optimization focus on removing or rearranging steps, as opposed to optimizing the conversion from one step to another.

I've gotten over 25 million unique visitors to my site, WreckedExotics.com since I launched it 10 years ago.

Here's a screenshot of the google analytics: http://i.imgur.com/gz9hJ.jpg

It's missing 3 years worth of data - and those were some of the highest traffic years, so essentially, the site has done over 1 billion pageviews. Best month was 1 million visitors. I run the site by myself.

I also created http://www.exoticspotter.com which attracts over 1 million visits per year and am working on a 3rd site that attracts about 500,000 visits per year.

I was just lucky to get the traffic - basically started a site that was naturally viral. I don't know how to program, I just know how to code HTML/CSS, so I've been running it as a completely static site this entire time. It needs an update badly.

The traffic took off almost immediately, I had it on a hosted server that crashed and I got a bill for almost $1,000 for overages. Moved it to a dedicated server and the rest is history.