Three launches got me 37 upvotes. One post where I wasn't selling anything did 20,000 views.

I've spent about four months trying to get traction for an idea-validation tool. Revenue is still $0, so read this as data from someone who has not solved it. But the numbers are real, and I almost never see anyone publish theirs side by side, so here's mine.

Everything I've done, in one place:

Product Hunt, launch #1 — 20 upvotes
Product Hunt, launch #2 — 8 upvotes
PeerPush — 9 upvotes
Google Ads — around $400 spent, under 10 signups a day, none of them worth anything yet
X / Twitter — account permanently suspended (my own fault, third-party posting tool)
LinkedIn — 22 followers, and every single one came from commenting on other people's posts, not from anything I published
Reddit — one thread, roughly 20,000 views
Here on IH — 33 posts. Best one: 500 views. The median is under 10.

Two things fell out of this that I didn't expect.

1. Every channel where I arrived to announce something failed. Every channel where I arrived to admit something worked.

Three launch events produced 37 upvotes combined. One Reddit thread where I wasn't launching anything produced 20,000 views. That's not a platform difference I've had posts die on Reddit too. The difference is what I showed up carrying. When I showed up with an announcement, I was asking the room for something. When I showed up with a problem I hadn't solved, I was handing the room something.

The uncomfortable version: launching is the single most self-centred thing you can do in a community, and I kept scheduling more of them.

2. Inside IH, my own ranking was the exact inverse of what I predicted.

Top post, by a distance: the one where I posted my failed launch numbers and asked what I did wrong. 500 views, 30 likes.

Near the bottom: the one where I decided to stop being modest and just describe what we'd built and why I was proud of it. 8 views.

Same product, same author, three weeks apart. Roughly 60x.

I've now read all 33 of mine in order, and the split is clean. Posts where I lose something get read. Posts where I win get ignored. Nobody wants your product. Quite a lot of people want the cost of a mistake they can skip.

The one that hurt to notice: I repeated my best insight six times. The first telling got 19 views. The sixth got 2. I was treating a finding like a message to be distributed, when the room had already heard it. Repetition doesn't compound reach, it burns it.

What I've actually changed

I stopped writing posts about my own launch I checked, and my last five were all some version of "here's what I'm anxious about before I ship." All of them under 15 views. There's nothing in those for a reader to take home.

And I stopped treating a launch as a distribution channel. It isn't one. It's a single loud day in front of whoever happens to be around, and I'd been budgeting months of hope against it. The stuff that actually accumulated the Reddit thread, the comments, this place didn't have a date attached to it.

(The product is Bunzee, and I'm deliberately not linking it here. Linking it is precisely the move that produced the 8-view post.)

What I still can't tell is whether 37 upvotes across three launches is just the normal floor for someone with no audience, or whether I'm doing something specifically wrong. I can't work it out from my own numbers, because the only numbers anyone ever publishes are their good ones.

So, a trade. Post your worst-performing channel and the actual number. Not your best one everybody posts that one. Your worst.

I'll go first, above. Three launch events, 37 upvotes, four months.