🥇 ProjectionLab launch metrics + insights: product of the day, +$200 MRR

👋 Hey everyone! I'm Kyle.

For the past year, I've been building a personal finance simulator called ProjectionLab as a side project.

I recently launched it on Product Hunt, and was fortunate enough to win #1 Product of the Day! 🎉

Here's a rundown of my launch experience and a few lessons learned.

TL;DR

Metrics

• 🥇 #1 Product of the Day
• 👍 375 Upvotes
• 👤 1202 New Active Users (who accepted cookies)
• ✅ +33 subscribers (+$200 MRR)

Takeaways

• Get the upvote snowball rolling early.
• It's best to build at least a small community of users before launching on Product Hunt.
• Don't over-invest time and energy into creating the assets for a perfect Product Hunt launch before exploring other channels that might produce more traffic for less work (e.g. Show HN).

A little background

I couldn't find a good long-term financial planning app that felt modern, fluid, detailed, and actually fun to use... and then somehow I ended up spending a year and a half of my free time building one 😅

It's been an interesting challenge creating something of that scope and complexity as a solo dev working nights/weekends, and I often look to the stories many of you share here on IndieHackers as a source of inspiration. Hopefully this post can offer an insight or two in return 🙏

The Launch

A year ago, I tried my first ever Product Hunt post with an early prototype of ProjectionLab... and it flopped. This time, I was determined to do a few things differently:

• Post on a lower-competition day (Saturday).
• Create better assets. Don't sweat making a video, but do create really nice images!
• Leverage ProjectionLab's growing community.

By now, I'd had time to build up an email list of 1.5k and Discord community of ~500. And at 12:01am Pacific Time when the post went live, I sent out notifications to both.

☀️ Launch day: 480 visits, +19 subscribers

The early activity from the ProjectionLab community put the product a few dozen votes ahead of the competition right away. I did my best to respond to every comment and foster meaningful discussion, and that early lead continued to snowball (aided by the fact that most visitors don't look past the top few products). It ended the day as #1!

🌤️ Day after: 442 visits, +9 subscribers

The day after the launch saw a similar volume of traffic from Product Hunt, but fewer conversions (many were returning users).

🌥️ 2 Days after: 280 visits, +5 subscribers

Two days after launch, Product Hunt traffic started tapering off.

Question: what do you use for analytics?

1.2k was the "measured" active user count for the launch, but the actual number is... unknown 😅. I've made a good-faith effort to abide by modern privacy best practices, and so ProjectionLab doesn't load/activate analytics unless the user accepts cookies first. For those of you who run sites that load analytics scripts right away and/or use cookie-free solutions, let me know what your tips/recommendations are in the comment section. Lacking accurate traffic metrics is starting to get old 😢

Thanks for reading!

The launch may have driven only a modest number of conversions (and an order of magnitude fewer visitors than a front-page HN post in my experience), but I'm super appreciative of the support and engagement, and energized to keep building new and exciting features ☕

If you like, feel free to follow me on Twitter... a platform I should perhaps start actually using(?)

And if you have any questions or comments to leave below, I'll try to answer them all!