Donating $250 to Warm Hearts Winter Drive Thanks to Hacker News!

A little over a week ago I published a blog post on how I put together a DIY spin bike for Peloton & Apple Fitness+ classes for under $400, and to my surprise it got shared on Hacker News! It was not only shared, but it got upvoted and at the peak it was ranked at number 7 of all Hacker News articles for the day! It was a wild ride watching the real time traffic for my site continue to see a bump for a full 36 hours.

In the end, the traffic for my site was 8x the normal amount, and the post jumped up to over 8,500 views!

I wrote the blog post for fun and in hopes that others that were interested in putting together a spin bike on the cheap could learn from my experience. Reading the comments on Hacker News and Twitter, I am glad to see that so many people found it helpful. One thing that I try to be transparent on in videos, blogs, and tweets is when I use a referral code in which I will generate a small amount of money if someone buys something from clicking the link. Spoiler alert, this is basically how every website on the internet works. In transparency I had a big disclaimer on the bottom of the post in which one Hacker News reader made it all the way to the bottom:

Now, I am not sure why they felt disappointed by this at all, but I am sorry that they did feel that way. As the blog continued to get hits, it drove referral traffic via Amazon. That day, I decided that after a week I would take portion of the proceeds from the Amazon affiliate program and donate it to a charity here in the PNW.

Today, I am donating $250 to the Warm Hearts Winter Drive. This is a great fundraiser by Columbia Bank that works to provide winter wear for those in need at homeless shelters throughout the Northwest.

This year they have raised just over $208,264 and are on their way to reach their goal of $250,000 by the end of the year! I want to thank all of the readers and upvoters of the article who helped make this donation possible. If you bought a spin bike, I hope that you enjoy it and let me know how it is going on Twitter.