Then I did it again with different code, without leveraging the existing user base, just to see if it was all luck.
Did you post it under a different name and account that none of your friends or contacts knew about? Just curious how you were able to be sure none of the existing user base or any of the notoriety you gained from the first hit contributed to the second.
They were fairly different demographics- for the second one I did post a link to it from a small site I made that shared the demographic a tiny bit (ragecaptions.com), and that seeded it with like 100 visitors a day, but that was it. Also, I obviously told my friends about it, but I have just a modest social network. For the curious, the first site was mylifeisaverage.com, the second was mylifeisbro.com. I never connected the two in any way (other than obviously playing off of the "My Life Is..." meme that had begun, but anyone could do that. See my life is twilight, etc.)
And fear not, I have no more 'mylifeis...' sites in production. I think a third one would just be sad.
Did you post it under a different name and account that none of your friends or contacts knew about? Just curious how you were able to be sure none of the existing user base or any of the notoriety you gained from the first hit contributed to the second.