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

A few days ago, my indie hacking project hit the front page of Indie Hackers. The traffic spiked, users started running complex SERP analyses, and then...

504 Gateway Timeout.

My tool takes a user's keyword, scrapes the top 10 Google results, pulls Domain Ranks via DataForSEO, and feeds it all into an LLM to find missing content gaps. The whole chain was taking up to 45 seconds. Cloudflare and the edge network instantly cut the connection at 30 seconds. Classic rookie mistake.

While I was frantically rewriting the backend into an async polling architecture (using ctx.waitUntil() to push the heavy LLM lifting to the background and pinging the frontend every 2 seconds), I was reading the IH comments.

The feedback was gold. Developers don't want AI that just writes more. They want AI that tells them what not to write. One user said: "Founders will pay to avoid publishing confident wrongness."

That inspired me to build the v2.0 features right into the new async rewrite. I added dynamic badges for "UGC Heavy" (when Reddit dominates a keyword) and "High-DA Thin Content" (when Forbes ranks but the article is garbage).

Now, the timeout is gone, and the data is brutally honest. If you are struggling to find a real niche where your side project can actually rank, I built https://thenichegap.com to save you from writing blind.