Launched on Product Hunt yesterday. Honest results and brutal conclusions.

Yesterday I launched Glyfiq on Product Hunt — a medical & health icon plugin for Figma and Framer. Here are the real numbers, no sugarcoating.

Product Hunt results:
— 21 points
— 3 comments
— #31 position
— 4 new plugin installs from PH traffic
— 0 paying subscribers

Plugin stats:
— Figma: 33 👉 37 installs
— Framer: 7 👉 7 opens

4 Figma installs happened across the same period when I was posting on social media, sending cold outreach, and running the Product Hunt launch simultaneously. I honestly can't attribute them to any single channel — it could be Figma Community search, it could be a post, it could be someone forwarding a link. What I know for sure is that Product Hunt traffic didn't show up as a measurable spike in the data.

What I learned about Product Hunt:

The mechanics are simple: indie developers upvote each other regardless of whether they're interested in the product. It's a mutual support system, not a discovery platform. The voters on my page are founders of API platforms, social media tools, and SaaS products. None of them are healthcare designers. None of them need medical icons.
The page exists now and indexes on Google. That has some long-term value. But as a launch channel for a niche B2B tool without an existing audience — it's a checkbox, not a growth engine.

Indie Hackers was equally disappointing.
I posted my story there first — honest, detailed, with real numbers. 10 views. One comment. The platform requires karma to post, which means new accounts are invisible by default. Without an existing audience or reputation there, you're shouting into a void. Another channel that rewards those who already have what you're trying to build.

The honest conclusion:
Every channel I've tried — Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dribbble, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers — requires either an existing audience or paid promotion to work. For a solo creator with no following and no budget, none of them deliver meaningful results on their own.
The only installs I have came from Figma Community organically. That's it. That's the only channel that worked without an audience.

What I'm doing next:
Direct outreach to healthcare designers and companies. Not posts. Not launches. Personal messages to specific people who actually need medical icons in their work. It's slower, it doesn't scale, but it's the only thing that makes sense right now.
In parallel I'll keep building. The roadmap is real — 6,000+ icons to add, new categories every month. The product gets more valuable with every batch and that's something I can actually control.
And I'll keep creating before/after content — real UI examples showing what a healthcare interface looks like with and without consistent medical icons. Not abstract promotion, but practical demonstrations of what the plugin actually does. If someone sees their exact use case solved, that's worth more than any launch.

Has anyone here found a way to reach a niche B2B audience from zero without paid ads? Genuinely curious what worked.