When I was 15 years old in early 2022, I stumbled upon an opportunity that would lead me to create a platform serving millions of users.
## A TikTok Video
Like many others my age at the time, I was an avid Genshin Impact player. I was in online school after dealing with various medical issues, finding mainstream not challenging & being assaulted and threatened at a mainstream school, so I had a lot of free time.
One night, while doom-scrolling TikTok, I came across a video where users expressed their frustration about not having easy access to game assets for Genshin and similar games.
With my existing hate for various storage providers, that video sparked an idea: I could create a site to solve this problem.
## The Initial Launch: wtf.dromzeh.dev
With some unused credits from my DigitalOcean GitHub Student grant, I spun up a site in about two hours. It was named wtf.dromzeh.dev, running on h5ai with NGINX, and I managed the DNS records with Cloudflare. It was simple, functional, and, most importantly, quick to deploy.
## Organic Growth Through Social Media
I didn't have a strategy, a marketing budget, or big expectations. All I did was comment on TikToks related to game assets, dropping a line about my site and letting people know the link was in my bio. To my surprise, it worked.
Within days, the traffic exploded. Users started posting their own TikToks about the site, drawing even more attention. My Discord DMs were overflowing, my inbox was packed, and my TikTok account blew up with comments. In just a few days, what started as a side project had grown to 3,000 daily users. I was stunned, and incredibly overwhelmed.
## Creating wanderer.moe
As wtf.dromzeh.dev struggled under the rapidly growing traffic, I knew I needed to create something more robust. That's when wanderer.moe was born. I decided to learn Svelte to build it, even though I only had backend programming experience in Node.js and Python at the time.
While on holiday, I built version 1 of wanderer.moe in just three days and deployed it on DigitalOcean. But I ran into a major problem: production-specific issues caused the site to go down, taking both wtf.dromzeh.dev and wanderer.moe offline for a couple days.
Being entirely on my own, I worked non-stop, determined to fix the issue. It turned out the problem was with DigitalOcean, I had faced issues with DigitalOcean before (where they randomly shut off the droplet wtf.dromzeh.dev was running on at 2am for a couple hours without informing me) so I made the move to Cloudflare Pages, and the site came back online.
Naturally, one of the first things you'd do is check if it's a provider issue, but I was under a lot of pressure from the attention, stress, and therefore not clearly thinking.
## New API Development in 2023
Initially, the assets were stored directly in the frontend. While this saved on costs, it required rebuilding the site every time new assets were added. As wanderer.moe grew, this approach became less sustainable.
In 2023, I designed and implemented a custom API to solve this problem. Using Cloudflare Workers and itty-router, I created an API that dynamically indexed files stored in a Cloudflare R2 bucket. This removed the need for constant manual rebuilds, made updates seamless and kept costs low.
## The 2024 Rewrite
As the platform continued to grow, I decided to rewrite wanderer.moe in Next.js to address performance issues.
The rewrite wasn't originally planned for early 2024, but a massive DDoS attack forced my hand. Attack traffic from various VPS providers overwhelmed the site, and I realized I couldn't delay the change. In just 6 hours, I built a completely new version of wanderer.moe in Next.js with an entirely fresh structure.
The effort paid off. wanderer.moe now averages 300,000 monthly active users.
## Conclusion
One singular tiktok comment changed the trajectory of my life life, and it really shows how fast your life can change. I've met so many amazing people, and I've learned so much along the way.
I ended up dropping out of college to work on wanderer.moe. I was only 16 at the time, and my parents did not approve as I wasn't making any money from wanderer.moe (and still don't).
They wanted me to go to University to do a degree, I disagreed with them and we ended up coming to a conclusion, me going to uni part-time instead of full-time.
Dropping out of college wasn't an easy decision, nor smart - and there were countless moments of doubt and exhaustion. But by staying focused and determined, I was able to turn a simple idea into something that impacts millions of people worldwide.
I'm now working on Originoid, a platform for creators to create and share their various work, with my leverage of wanderer.moe and both platforms sharing the same userbase, it has over 15,000 people currently on the waitlist.
Hopefully, this will allow me to generate a stable income to continue making useful tools for creators.
## Believe in Yourself and Your Ideas
If there's one thing I've learned from this journey, it's that believing in yourself and your ideas is crucial.
So, if you're passionate about something and there's an opportunity right infront of you, take the leap. It's not always going to be smooth, but the lessons, growth, and rewards you'll gain make it worth it. Even if you fail, you learn from your mistakes, and that's valuable for the long run.
You can literally just build things. Even if you don't have much experience with programming, there are so resources available that let you build whatever you want.
You can view the full project on wanderer.moe.