My side project went viral on Indie Hackers. Then it timed out. Here’s how I fixed it.

My indie hacking project gained viral attention on Indie Hackers after a few days. The traffic surged, and users began running complex SERP analyses; however, a 504 Gateway Timeout error emerged. My tool operates by taking a user's keyword, scraping the top 10 Google results, extracting Domain Ranks through DataForSEO, and feeding the information into an LLM to identify missing content gaps.

The entire process could take up to 45 seconds, which Cloudflare and the edge network promptly cut at 30 seconds. I realized it was a rookie mistake and quickly rewrote the backend into an async polling architecture. This included utilizing ctx.waitUntil() to offload the heavy LLM processing to the background and periodically communicating with the frontend every 2 seconds.

While I was refining the backend, I found valuable feedback from the Indie Hackers community. Developers were not looking for AI that merely writes more content; they sought AI that informed them of what not to write. One user pointed out that founders would pay to avoid publishing confident but incorrect information. This insight inspired me to incorporate v2.0 features into the new async rewrite.

I introduced dynamic badges to highlight key insights, such as "UGC Heavy" when Reddit dominates a keyword and "High-DA Thin Content" when Forbes ranks an article poorly despite its content. With these enhancements, the timeout issue was resolved, and the data became candid. If you're grappling with identifying a genuine niche where your side project can truly rank, I developed https://thenichegap.com to assist you in avoiding blind writing.