Four launch posts, zero clicks. So I measured the places we're all told to launch

Last month I launched a Stripe app. Four posts in a week across two channels, the usual sequence. Then I did the part almost nobody does, which is check whether anybody clicked.

I'd put a beacon on the landing page first. First-party, about forty lines, logs the path and the referrer and a timestamp. No vendor, no dashboard.

Nothing arrived. Not "low", not "a trickle". Zero non-bot rows across the launch window, and none in the four months before it either.

The first version of my classifier actually told me I had six human visits and I nearly believed it. Then I read the rows. Two shared an identical microsecond timestamp. One claimed a Chrome build that has never existed. One was running Windows NT 11.0, which also does not exist. I rewrote the classifier. The real number is zero, or at best one.

That number is boring on its own. Plenty of launches get no traction. What kept me going was realizing I had no idea whether the venues themselves work, and as far as I can tell neither does anyone handing out the advice.

So I measured one.

I pulled 600 recent r/microsaas posts through a public archive mirror and classified them.

Of the 183 that were launch-shaped, 77 survived. That is 42 percent. Sixty-seven were removed by a moderator, 30 by Reddit's filter, 9 deleted by the author. The baseline across all 600 posts was 49 percent, so the sub removes roughly half of everything submitted, launch post or not.

Median score of a surviving launch post: 1. The highest in the whole set was 19.

So the realistic outcome of launching there is a coin flip on whether it stays up, and if it stays up, one upvote.

I want to be careful about what that is. It is survival data, not policy. I could not read the sub's actual rules through the mirror, so I can tell you what does not make it, not what is against the rules. The mirror is also a free service that fails often.

The fallback advice, when launch posts do not work, is always the same. Stop posting, start commenting helpfully in threads where your buyer already is. I tried that too. My comments in founder subs scored about 1 each. Someone else ran 17 of them in three days across the same subs and every one of those scored 1 as well.

What I think this means, and where I am stuck.

It does not mean these places are useless. It means the specific thing being recommended has a measured outcome near zero, and almost nobody recommending it has measured it. My past self included.

It also does not rule out the simplest explanation, which is that my posts were bad and my product is uninteresting. I cannot separate that from a channel effect with one launch, and neither can anyone else who has run one.

One update, because it cuts against my own story. Last week the beacon logged four human visits, and one of them arrived with a referrer from this site. That is the first time in the beacon's life that any channel demonstrably moved a person to the page. It came from leaving comments, not from a launch post, and it is one visit, so I am not going to pretend it is a trend.

The thing I would genuinely like answered: has anyone here instrumented a launch end to end and got a number they trust? Not signups. Clicks. I have read a lot of launch retros and I cannot remember one that said where the traffic came from, including the ones that worked.