Hey everyone! In July, I quit my job of seven years to start my own business. Two weeks ago, I finally launched my first serious product, Coding Font (codingfont.com), with my co-founder. We have gotten a lot of support here, and I wanted to share some results from our launch, especially the insightful yet surprising data points.
Stats from Launch and After
- 36,729 users visited codingfont.com,
- 22,000 on Launch day
- Among the traffic with a referral source
- 43% from Hacker News
- 16% from Reddit
- 7% from coliss
- 6% from GeekNews
- 6% from Twitter and Facebook shares
- 4% from Product Hunt
A few data points surprised me:
- Traffic from Product Hunt is low, only accounting for 4% of the referral traffic and 2% of the overall traffic.
- High traffic from Korea and Japan, generated by postings on coliss (Japan) and GeekNews (Korea)
Was PH Worth it?
This was the first time I got onto the front page of Product Hunt, so I didn’t know what to expect and had false high hopes. The competition on PH is fierce. Within 10 minutes after PH started counting votes, one of the products got more than 100 votes, where my app got a single-digit number of votes. Throughout the day, my app’s placement steadily fluctuated between 15 and 16, while the number of votes slowly climbed up to 230. Product Hunt launch is the one I spent the most mental energy on. In hindsight, I overestimated the importance of the PH launch and spent too much time and energy planning. However, traffic is traffic; I don’t think I should give up on the Product Hunt launch in the future. Instead, I could optimize the workflow to maximize the return on investment.
Launch with Regional News Aggregator
I want to plan a more international launch in the future – post on regional news aggregators like coliss.com and GeekNews.
I need to gather more sites like that and then get the launch post translated. Maybe there could be a service that helps founders do that? It could be a great business opportunity. If you know of regional sites similar to Hacker News, please comment here. I will compile them into a list and share it with everyone here and in my newsletter.
I Learned More about My Product
The most significant benefit of launching is getting more feedback about the product and learning what users want. I have gotten many feature requests over on discussion forums, like synchronizing scrolling within the code samples, allowing users to change code snippets or use their code. While I continued to gather them, I learned a lot about the additional needs of my users. This truly makes launching worthwhile.
Lastly, thanks so much to everyone who supported us on PH and checked out Coding Font. If you enjoyed this post, I also write a weekly newsletter to share the learnings of building my startup from scratch. You can also find the original post there with links and additional data. I hope you will join me for the ride!
