I Launched to Crickets: 118 Visitors, 0 Signups, and Two Bugs I Found Digging In

Two weeks ago I launched Postmint, a tool that turns one sentence into a finished social graphic in your brand colors. Eight days later: about 118 unique visitors, zero signups that weren’t me.

Here’s the whole autopsy, because the launch posts that helped me most were the ones with real numbers in them.

• About 118 unique visitors over 8 days. Two spike days: 28 visitors on the 14th, 20 on the 17th. Half Germany, half US.
• Roughly 2 of those 118 reached the register page. 1.7 percent even started signing up.
• Zero external signups. The one account, its 28 generations and the €49 of MRR in my own dashboard are all me.
• 80 percent of visitors logged as “Direct”, because I tagged exactly nothing.
• 28 of 28 generations succeeded. The product itself worked the whole time.
• My Show HN was flagged in 25 minutes.

That last one was deserved. A baity, slop-flavored title into an AI-fatigued crowd, from a cold account with no karma, linking to a paid SaaS landing page behind a signup wall. Three of those were my doing.

Two bugs did most of the damage, though, and neither was in the product.

Bug one: the landing page explained instead of showed

Social traffic bounced in about five seconds. The German landing page did marginally better, 74 percent gone at 19 seconds.

The opening screen explained what the product does. For a tool whose entire pitch is “look at what comes out of this”, that’s the wrong screen. The output was further down, and nobody scrolled far enough to reach it. I had built the proof and then hidden it below the fold.

Bug two: the goal that never fired

This is the one that stings.

Plausible recorded zero signups for the whole launch, which was technically accurate and completely useless, because the Signup goal was not firing at all. It got lost across a redirect. EmailVerified fired once, which is impossible without a signup first, and that impossibility was sitting in my dashboard for a week while I read it as bad news rather than broken instrumentation.

So the number I actually cared about, Signup → FirstGeneration, was structurally unmeasurable for the entire launch. It’s the one number I steer by. If people register and never generate, more traffic is wasted and I should be fixing onboarding instead of posting. I spent a week staring at a dashboard that could not have shown me a signup even if there had been one.

That bug is why I’d push this on anyone about to launch. Register a throwaway account in an incognito window and confirm each funnel event actually fires. Five minutes. I skipped it and burned my only launch spike.

The part that wasn’t a bug at all

There’s a second uncomfortable thing in the numbers: my own plan barely ran.

Roughly 20 percent of my own launch week happened. The week-0 asset pack, which I had written down as the blocker for everything in week 1, never got built, so the high-intent half of the launch sweep never went out: Show HN went up unprepared, Indie Hackers and the directories mostly didn’t happen. OMR Reviews, the German B2B review platform with the highest purchase intent of anything on my list, is still empty.

I also launched on a Friday, against a rule I had written down myself three days earlier.

And I bet on the wrong channel. LinkedIn was the designated primary, the DACH B2B audience I was aiming at. It delivered 2 visitors at 100 percent bounce. Facebook delivered 6 at 83 percent. Meanwhile the two most engaged groups in the data were Indie Hackers and Product Hunt, with average sessions of 40 and 49 minutes. English-speaking and technical, which my own plan had explicitly deprioritized.

The community channel I expected the most from, the German Shopware and DACH network, needs a two-week warm-up before you mention a product at all. I wrote the plan three days before launch. It never had a chance.

What I changed

The goal is fixed, the release is cut, and I watched an incognito signup fire the events end to end. The funnel records now.

I rebuilt the landing page’s first screen around output instead of explanation. I killed the blank canvas too: a brand-new user used to land on an empty brief box and get asked to invent the one sentence they don’t yet know the shape of, so it’s prefilled with an example now and the first render is a button press.

Every channel link is tagged, so this time I’ll know where people came from.

Still zero external paying customers. The gallery of what it makes is open if you want to poke at it, no signup needed to look: postmint.de/en/templates

The question I can’t answer

Postmint is German-first. The buyers I have in mind are DACH small businesses and shops. And yet the two most engaged audiences in my launch data were Indie Hackers and Product Hunt: English, technical, 40-plus-minute sessions.

Is that real interest worth chasing, or builders admiring the machinery who will never buy? I can’t tell, and the answer changes what I build next. If you’ve launched something German-first and hit the same split, I’d like to hear which way it went.