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I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt la

I've posted on hacker news (avg 5-15 page views), Reddit (avg 2-5 page views) and Quora (no pages views that can be tracked anyway). Most of my Product hunt launches are completely dead, getting almost 0 traffic, although there was 1 that got 200 upvotes and nearly 400 page views). It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories I've heard on indiehackers typically are due to Google giving them a steady stream of traffic in the hundreds or thousands per day.

xenospn 7y ago
Facebook groups are a good source of traffic, so are Instagram story links, if you can find someone with more than 10k followers to send them your way.
nobody271 7y ago
Thank God I'm not the only one who can't drum up support on reddit. One thing that has worked for me in the past, though, is buying upvotes. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. People really love to downvote things. I mean they love it. They'd marry downvoting everything that isn't a meme if they could. Also, I think reddit is probably wise to bought upvotes. Either that or my super power is making people universally downvote my posts until the upvotes I purchased run out. I mean reddit can be good but successful posts are pretty random as far as I can tell. But also, even if you get like 400 page views (which I did too once, thanks to purchased upvotes) those numbers drop off fast. I wonder if slow and steady advertising on facebook would be a better way to go.
Data_Junkie 7y ago
So no matter what you do, your success is entirely in Google's hands ? Is that what you're saying ?
- pascalxus 7y ago
  it depends on the business model of course. if you're product makes more than 5000$ per month per customer you have other options available to you. And, virality is not unheard of, even this day and age, but incredibly rare. I'm just saying, in many indiehacker success cases I've read, they're getting significant traffic from Google.
raviojha 7y ago
I can relate to this. Not a product, but a blog I run gets just ~20 (out of ~200 page views/day) of traffic from HN, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter combined. Rest is organic and most of it is via Google searches.
muzani 7y ago
I launched a product. We got got a thousand downloads on the first day just by posting in one FB group about it. In the long run, about half the downloads came from google searches. One trick is to completely forget about branding. E.g. if you wanted to promote a habit building app, just call it "Habit building", not "Habitly" or some custom name. We were on 5 newspapers and several blogs. Nobody reads newspapers, and they brought us about 3% of traffic. However, about 10% of our total traffic (and about 90% early on), came from people linking newspaper articles. Blogs, one of our suppliers, Facebook groups. HN, Reddit, Quora actually seem terrible direct ways to get traffic, but awesome indirect ways for it. You can't actually shill yourself, someone else has to do it for you.
VvdHout 7y ago
Hi! Thanks for sharing. Yeah I totally get you. Have been very dependent on Google with another project of mine and it's not great. But right now I am more trying to figure out how to just get a bunch of (target) people in front of my MVP (which is really just a landing page) for another idea, just so I can start to talk to them. I feel a landing page is probably not enough to post on HN or PH but paying Google for ads is also so, so. The other thing I have been trying is going to related subreddits and that seem to bring in at least some feedback (maybe not super specific to what I am doing, but in general).

xenospn 7y ago

Facebook groups are a good source of traffic, so are Instagram story links, if you can find someone with more than 10k followers to send them your way.

nobody271 7y ago

Thank God I'm not the only one who can't drum up support on reddit. One thing that has worked for me in the past, though, is buying upvotes. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. People really love to downvote things. I mean they love it. They'd marry downvoting everything that isn't a meme if they could. Also, I think reddit is probably wise to bought upvotes. Either that or my super power is making people universally downvote my posts until the upvotes I purchased run out. I mean reddit can be good but successful posts are pretty random as far as I can tell. But also, even if you get like 400 page views (which I did too once, thanks to purchased upvotes) those numbers drop off fast. I wonder if slow and steady advertising on facebook would be a better way to go.

Data_Junkie 7y ago

So no matter what you do, your success is entirely in Google's hands ? Is that what you're saying ?

pascalxus 7y ago
it depends on the business model of course. if you're product makes more than 5000$ per month per customer you have other options available to you. And, virality is not unheard of, even this day and age, but incredibly rare. I'm just saying, in many indiehacker success cases I've read, they're getting significant traffic from Google.

raviojha 7y ago

I can relate to this. Not a product, but a blog I run gets just ~20 (out of ~200 page views/day) of traffic from HN, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter combined. Rest is organic and most of it is via Google searches.

muzani 7y ago

I launched a product. We got got a thousand downloads on the first day just by posting in one FB group about it. In the long run, about half the downloads came from google searches. One trick is to completely forget about branding. E.g. if you wanted to promote a habit building app, just call it "Habit building", not "Habitly" or some custom name. We were on 5 newspapers and several blogs. Nobody reads newspapers, and they brought us about 3% of traffic. However, about 10% of our total traffic (and about 90% early on), came from people linking newspaper articles. Blogs, one of our suppliers, Facebook groups. HN, Reddit, Quora actually seem terrible direct ways to get traffic, but awesome indirect ways for it. You can't actually shill yourself, someone else has to do it for you.

VvdHout 7y ago

Hi! Thanks for sharing. Yeah I totally get you. Have been very dependent on Google with another project of mine and it's not great. But right now I am more trying to figure out how to just get a bunch of (target) people in front of my MVP (which is really just a landing page) for another idea, just so I can start to talk to them. I feel a landing page is probably not enough to post on HN or PH but paying Google for ads is also so, so. The other thing I have been trying is going to related subreddits and that seem to bring in at least some feedback (maybe not super specific to what I am doing, but in general).