Side-project made it to front page of HN and got 6.7k unique visitors in two days

This was my tactic to promote www.hnjn.org; I built a fun game at www.hngitblame.com!

I switched off Vercel Analytics because I ran out of their free plan, but the game is still getting a steady trickle of traffic (using self-hosted analytics now).

The conversion rate was below my expectations. Only ~1% of visitors clicked on the other links, let alone subscribe. This might've been because of how passive the link placement was.

My conclusion is that making free tools/games can drive traffic, but you need to ensure you have a CTA at the end of the experience — or some clear way for you to accrue value from all this traffic.