477 signups later, here’s what surprised me about user acquisition
I launched LiveFaceSwap AI a few weeks ago. It’s a real-time AI face swap product that runs in the cloud, so users don’t need a powerful local GPU.
So far, it has reached:
477 signups
10 paying users
Around 100 visits per day
What surprised me most wasn’t the total traffic — it was how differently each channel converted.
My top signup sources were:
Direct: 227
GitHub: 32
Bing: 32
Google: 32
Toolify: 29
ChatGPT: 21
YouTube: 9
But the 10 paying users came from:
Direct: 5
YouTube: 2
ChatGPT: 1
GitHub: 1
Google: 1
The interesting one is YouTube.
It only brought 9 attributed signups, but 2 of them paid.
Meanwhile, some channels brought much more traffic without producing the same level of conversion.
It’s still a tiny sample size, so I don’t want to overfit the data. But it changed how I think about acquisition.
I used to pay much more attention to traffic and signup numbers. Now I’m starting to care more about:
Where did the paying users actually come from?
For this product, my next focus will probably be SEO + YouTube, while continuing to test smaller channels.
Product: https://livefaceswap.ai
For other indie hackers: have you also found that your highest-traffic channel and highest-converting channel are completely different?
The gap between signup volume and paid conversion is much more revealing here than the traffic numbers alone. YouTube standing out with only 9 attributed signups is a particularly interesting signal.
High-traffic ≠ high-converting is one of the most common traps in early acquisition, and your numbers show it cleanly. The channel that fills the top of the funnel is rarely the one that produces paying users — traffic builds reach, but conversion needs trust. YouTube is likely under-attributed here: people watch, forget, then come back through direct traffic weeks later, which probably inflates your Direct line more than you think. The question isn't which channel brought signups — it's which one earned the attention that made the buying decision easier. Thanks for sharing the real breakdown, most people only post the impressive numbers.