LaunchROI: Post-Launch Traffic & Channel Analytics for Indie Founders

We did several announcements on product hunt, tried a few online and classic PR agencies, and got a few launches to show up in hackernews. Product hunt was mostly a waste of time, it led only to weeks of incoming spam of people offering promotion services and trying to convince us that we should give their community a lifetime discount in exchange for some unclear marketing advantage. it's so saturated these days that the traffic we usually get is negligible. Popping up on the frontpage of hackernews is a one time traffic spike of about 10-40k people depending on how high and how long it stays there, plus SEO residuals from sites that copy HN links. If the product is relevant for that audience, it leads to lots of people playing with it as well. Classic PR was a total waste of money. We paid 15K GBP for an agency to put us into mainstream media, they only managed to get a few low-ranking blogs and one second-rate tech newspaper to link to us. I'm not against this approach in practice, but the agency we chose was bad and I don't know how I could have chosen better, so we stopped doing things like that. Online PR (people with access to PR newswire or globe newswire) costs about 200-500 USD depending on the service and gets hundreds of low-quality links quickly across media sites that are paid to carry the news. The last time I did this was a month ago, and it got us about 1000 visits and about 10 registrations. Sometimes, rarely and magically, a proper journalist will pick up the news and write an article about it (it happened twice to me) and you'll get a high quality link and thousands of people to come, but it's a lottery. It used to be valuable as a quick way to buy decent backlinks but most of those sites now put nofollow into links, and google seems to just dedupe them because the content is the same. So mostly not worth it now, but can be a low-effort way to get some initial people.

Long time user of PH here., I’m also a tech founder (B2C). Hand on heart, PH has gotten junk and it’s a heavy downfall from now., Here is the thing: It’s founders Vs founders on PH. Most are not even serious founders, but side project types launching heavy vibe coded apps., It’s the same old Mac dictation apps, schedulers and the so called agentic products which are just chatbots that are being launched every single day., My experience has been heavily driven towards platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn. Doesn’t matter if it’s B2B or B2C, it works decent., Also, I focus a lot of llm citations which involves ASEO., A launch is a sprint and most of these launch pads are a dud., Sure as founders we gotta try with everything but I would recommend to stay away from these money gobbling PR aggregators and launch pads., Maybe consider investing the same $$ on performance marketing like ads and content .,

Launched on PH a few years back and got maybe 300 visitors that day, like 40 signups, zero paying customers. The traffic completely dried up after 48 hours. What actually helped was one person in the comments who worked at a dev tool company, they ended up using us internally and referred like 8 other companies.