Can you help me help cocktail makers at home

👋 Hey! Nick here – creator and cocktail lover behind my first love (sorry wife!), makemeacocktail.com.

It feels really crazy to write this but we at Make Me A Cocktail (we comprises of little me and a few trusty friends of mine who help out) are up against time until we can get some quickly orchestrated but long term plans in place.

While up and awake with my 7 day old son at 2am GMT on Wednesday this week, (he’s called Flynn by the way and gets his good looks from his mum); I thought I'd pop onto the website and make sure all was well......I wasn't prepared to see the site offline and the server just maxed out crashing continuously anytime any resources got freed up.

When I say this has only happened a couple of times in 10 years of Make Me A Cocktail, I mean it! I love creating beautiful looking, beautifully engineered sites so I couldn’t believe what had caused the site and the server to crash!

Then came the messages…. Hundreds and hundreds of messages. ‘Can’t get on your site’, ‘your site won’t load on my phone’, ‘site forbidden’ was the general making-me-feel-sick type of messages I was receiving! Amongst the gloom and confusing messages, I see another message – ‘Dude, TikTok killed your site 😊’ and I get sent this link….. TikTok viral video....

THE BEST THING THATS HAPPENED TO QUARANTINE SINCE TIGER KING (PS Making these for my parents :) ##foryoupage ##fyp ##cocktail ##quarantine ##recipe

At the time of writing (only 4-5 days later) that one video has had over 11 million views, 2.3 million likes and 500,000 shares. In amongst the shares, are major social media influencers and blogs that continue to increase the audience interest and traffic to the site, just because they like what Make Me A Cocktail is all about as does every single person around the world who has been trying to get on it since!

The feedback, love and support for our site is incredible. So many of your all around the world love the reason behind why Make Me A Cocktail exists now that they know it exists! It makes me so damn happy as this was the reason behind the frustration that meant I built the site 10 years ago!

Right now, it seems Make Me A Cocktail is helping hundreds and thousands of people be creative and enjoy being in the safety of their own home in lockdown at this crazy time all around the world. In the first 72 hours since then I sought the expertise of a server and infrastructure guru (hat tip to my buddy James) and invested a major chunk of my savings on some eyewatering server capacity to quickly get the site up to speed for the enormous and still growing audience. I really, really want to be able to keep the site running and speedy for all those who need the site right now!

We have got long term revenue generating plans in their infancy, but I don’t know if they will pay off in time before I run out of personal finances (rain check – we were ticking along great 5 days ago and the 10 years before then!)

This is where I turn to you. You are either a brand-new amazing member and subscriber of Make Me A Cocktail (hey by the way - welcome to the community!) or have been a loyal and avid member of the community for years (you all rock).

If you can donate the cost of one cocktail you would be buying in a bar right now if you weren’t in lockdown, or even $5 per month for as long as you need the site in your life for, you will help me and makemeacocktail survive and thrive for you and others to enjoy.

Make the donation to keep the site going on makemeacocktail.com/support. For complete openness and honesty, I breakdown all the costs for running this site.

So that’s the situation I’m now facing, 5 days in, loving life but doing all I can right now to keep makemeacocktail.com going before I’m forced to make tough decisions.