The Product Hunt spike died. Then I got my first paying customer.

Last Monday, I launched PostSider on Product Hunt and finished around #13 Product of the Day.

The launch brought a noticeable spike in traffic. Then, as expected, it started falling a few days later.

That could have been the end of the story: a decent ranking, a backlink, some visitors and a very full inbox of people trying to sell me Product Hunt promotion.

But on Wednesday, something much more important happened.

PostSider got its first paying customer.

They subscribed to the Teams plan.

For months, I could say that the product worked. It was running in production, publishing my own content and handling real social accounts. But that still did not answer the most uncomfortable question:

Would anyone else consider it valuable enough to pay for?

Now, at least one person has answered yes.

It is only one customer. I am not going to turn it into an imaginary success story or pretend that I have suddenly found product-market fit.

But the first payment feels different from traffic, likes or Product Hunt rankings.

Someone discovered a product that had launched only a few days earlier, evaluated it and decided it was worth paying for. That is a small but real piece of validation.

I also spent the rest of the week improving the less exciting parts:

• rewrote parts of the website to explain the product more clearly,

• improved the basic SEO,

• continued working on pages that can bring long-term search traffic,

• started seeing more referrals from ChatGPT,

• and on some days, ChatGPT sent more visitors than Google.

The Product Hunt spike is already fading. That is fine.

A temporary traffic spike gave me visibility. The first paying customer gave me a reason to keep going.

Thanks to everyone who supported the launch and upvoted PostSider.

How long did it take you to get your first paying customer after launching, and where did they find you?