Author here, as I mentioned in my post it was nothing but pure luck and building something that the community wanted but never had. I wish I had answers for you. Been an active hacker news reader for a long time and the last thing I would do is to spam a community where I get valuable tech news.
Not sure why this was flagged but I am happy to provide video evidence and even show it live on a call if that makes you feel at ease
Author here -- for sure was not expecting this amount of feedback. To be honest as I did not do anything special to gain that traction as I mentioned in my post. A community of fantasy league picked it up and started creating links with it and sharing their payment page via facebook which eventually led more and more people to see it.
author here! I built it selfishly because each time someone comes to my house to do work (cut grass, clean, barber, handy man, etc..) I am always asking the question - "what payment app can I pay you with?" If they have a paylinkz URL I can simply just pick whatever is convenient for me and pay them via it.
I'd also mention that since launching the app, I have see the users span from basketball coaches, non-profits to side hustlers.
I spent about 3 months in Europe and I was totally amazed with the efficiency of BlaBlaCar! That actually ended up inspiring me to work on http://www.thetripbuddyapp.com/ - To be honest I wished transportation in the US was as efficient as Europe.
I wrote a hashtag extractor for a project am working but I have to admit that I am particularly impressed with the robustness of the regex! I am definitely going to use some aspects of this code.