Launched on HN and Product Hunt. 3 points and 1 upvote. 7 weeks after "distribution is the wall".

Hey again! Back in June I posted here that distribution is the wall for my free FIRE calculator site. Well.. Here's a quick update on what 7 weeks of running at that wall looks like.

I did the two things everyone tells you to do. Show HN on July 20 = 3 points, 0 comments. Product Hunt on July 24 = 1 upvote, 0 comments. Not a disaster, just.. silence. Nobody saw it, basically.

But.. I kept building anyway. Went from 6 to 9 calculators (couples, pension and social security variants, all picked from actual Search Console-queries people were already typing, not from guessing). Also built a reference tables page that's meant to be cited rather than read.

The data after 3 months is pretty clear tho.. My long-tail pages sit around position 9 to 13 when they show up at all, while the head keyword is stuck around 50. Which reads to me as: the site needs authority. More pages won't move it.

So I stopped chasing spikes. Instead I'm pitching the standing "best FIRE calculator" lists, because when you check where competitors actually get their links from, its these lists, not launches. 4 pitches out so far. Also pitched 3 Norwegian tech outlets this weekend, since I'm from Oslo and a .no link counts just as much for US queries. And directories, AlternativeTo is pending moderation.

Honest numbers: hosting is about $1/month. Claude Max (I build with AI) is $100/month. Revenue: $0. Email list: 0 real subscribers. The wall is still there, I'm just hitting it in a different spot now.

The site, for context: https://firecalculatorhq.com/

Question for anyone further along: has anyone actually gotten into one of those standing "best X" lists? Did you pitch the author or just get noticed? Curious wether cold pitching these ever works.