I promised to report what each channel converted. 18 days in, I can't, and that's the post

Said I'd come back with real numbers, so here they are.

First, the promise I can't keep: I said I'd report what each channel converts. I can't. I never instrumented attribution before launch, so I have placements and I have signups, and no honest line connecting the two. That's the most expensive mistake of the two and a half weeks and it cost me nothing to avoid. If you're pre-launch reading this, that's the free lesson: an hour of attribution work before launch day might be worth more than anything you'll do on launch day. I got so busy just trying to get content online I skipped some steps.

What I do have is the activation funnel, which turned out to be the more interesting half anyway.

- 31 signups since launch

- 18 of them opened a lesson

- 8 of those at least wrote a line of code in it

- 4 actually finished a lesson

- 0 paying

So 13 people signed up and never opened anything, and another 10 opened a lesson and stopped before typing. The whole business is downstream of that second group. I spent two and a half weeks optimizing the top of the funnel while the leak was in the first five minutes of the product, which I could have measured on day one for free.

Costs: $0 on ads. Total inference cost of every lesson anyone has run since launch, on my own key, is 31 cents. The free tier is capped at 10 lessons a month and nobody has come close to hitting it, which kills the "raise the limits" theories.

Channel placements, for whatever they're worth without conversion data: Show HN got 4 points. Product Hunt finished 83rd. A directory called Uneed that I hadn't heard of a month ago put us 3rd for the day. The pattern I did not expect is that the twenty-minute directory listings did more for me than the two launches every founder optimizes for. I'm not a social media native and it shows, so take that as one founder's data point rather than advice.

The other honest thing: on the Team tier question I asked in this thread on day 3, I still don't have an answer, because I have no upgrades of either kind to learn from. What I have instead is a hypothesis I'm now going to test directly. Through September I'm taking a few engineering teams as onboarding pilots, hands-on setup from me, in exchange for real feedback that isn't filtered through politeness. If self-serve was never going to produce Team accounts at this volume anyway, better to find out from ten real teams than from another month of waiting.

Next 30 days: fix the first lesson, instrument activation properly, and stop treating launch days as the job.

Question for anyone further along: how did you instrument activation early without building an analytics project instead of a product? I keep debating myself about a week of tooling I don't think I can afford right now.