40K visits & 1K subscribers in 10 days - a detailed breakdown

Hello Indie Hackers!

In this post, I will share how I got ~1000 subscribers to my newsletter by launching a side project.

This post will have quite a lot of helpful information and hopefully, you will like it.

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For those who don't know me: I'm Victor and in the past year I've been focused on writing content related to UI/UX.

I was gradually growing my Twitter audience, and now I do the same with LinkedIn (feel free to connect/follow), and apart from social networks, I'm trying to grow my newsletter.

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One of the tactics that work very well for me is to launch side projects (satellite projects) that might be interesting for PH/HN/Reddit/Twitter audience.

So I decided to make a site about the history of UI: https://history.user-interface.io and try to launch it on all major social networks.

And the result was a little bit surprising.

Product hunt launch

The PH launch wasn't as successful as my previous launches, but I still was able to get ~400 upvotes and 5-6 place at the end of the day.

What brought me about 2.8k visitors, but the conversion to subscribers was a bit low. In total, I got ~100-150 new subscribers. I actually expected to get 1-2K subscribers, because the last time I launched a product here I got around 1K subs I believe.

Anyway, it was still not bad.

Reddit launch

On Reddit, I was able to get 50K views for my post, but the number of visitors according to my analytics was only 234. Not sure how many subs I got from Reddit, obviously not many.

Hacker news launch

As for hacker news, it's the most difficult network ever to promote your content. Basically, all my submissions were blocked, even though I knew quite a lot of things about how HN works, I wasn't able to post my site there.

However, once I woke up and saw a message in my inbox that I had a traffic spike.

It turned out that somebody posted my site. Actually, it was the second time somebody posted my site there, but this time it got to the front page and it was somewhere in the top-5.

And here is where the magic happened.

Not only I got almost 7k visitors directly from hacker news, it turned out that people started sharing my site on Twitter. One of the tweets got more than 100 RTs, and was getting viral across a lot of sites.

Let me share with you some analytics that can be useful.

This is an overall traffic for https://history.user-interface.io/

And these are the different sources of traffic, that shows the fact that the site became viral overall

So this fact is really exciting. By getting to the top of HN page, people started sharing the site. And even after 10 days from the PH launch, I still got ~1K uniques/day, this is like a snowball.

Even from time to time I got random small traffic spikes and I don't know where people come from.

And here is the overall number of new subscribers (via three forms)

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What is the conclusion?

Well, this is the first time when apart from getting traffic from the sites that I usually use (PH, HN, Reddit), I got traffic from "general virality".

This is the first time I see so many different sources of traffic, and it's pretty exciting and motivating to do some other projects that might be interesting. Because chances are that they'll get shared.

Probably this is how guys like Adam Wathan or Jash Cameau got such huge exposure over the internet: due to their outstanding products.