My install count went 30 → 200. My user count went 13 → 27.

WordPress.org rotates eight lesser-known plugins into the tab that opens by

default when you go to install anything. No application, no fee. Someone there

picks eight every two weeks. Mine got picked.

Two weeks of the best free distribution I am ever going to get.

I recorded a baseline before it started and logged the numbers daily, because

I could not find a single founder who had been through this and published what

it actually did.

Installs went from 30 to 200.

Then the part I did not expect. The share of those people who ever used the

product went from 50% to 4.8%. In absolute terms: thirteen people used it in

the thirteen days before, twenty-seven during.

Twenty-two times the traffic bought twice the users.

I keep coming back to that one. Not because it is bad news, but because for two

weeks I would have called this a success and been right by every number I would

normally have quoted.

The people were real. Email verification held at the same rate on either side,

so it was not scripts. What changed was why they arrived. Before, somebody

installing had gone looking for what I make. During, they were scanning a list

of eight on a screen WordPress opens by itself.

Discovery and intent are not the same thing, and only one of them shows up in

an install count.

The thing I would tell anyone about to get a spike: decide before it starts

which number would make you call it a success, and make sure that number sits

downstream of the install. Otherwise you get the spike, feel great, and learn

nothing.

All of it is written up, including the half that does not flatter me:

Has anyone here had a distribution spike and measured what came out the other

end? I have one data point and it is my own, which is the least useful kind.