Biyun Hu launched a Stripe app with four posts in a week and tracked every visit with her own beacon: zero human visits. She then analysed 600 r/microsaas posts — 42% of launch posts survived moderation, and the median survivor got 1 upvote.
01The problem
Standard launch advice says to post in founder communities. She wanted to know whether anyone actually clicked.
02The hypothesis
Launch posts in founder subreddits bring visitors.
03The experiment
She put a small first-party beacon on the landing page (path, referrer, timestamp), then launched with four posts in a week across two channels.
Nothing arrived: zero non-bot visits across the launch window. An early version of her classifier reported six human visits, but on inspection they were bots.
She then pulled 600 recent r/microsaas posts through an archive mirror: of 183 launch posts, 77 survived moderation (42%), against a 49% survival rate for all posts. The median surviving launch post scored 1; the best scored 19.
The usual fallback — helpful comments instead of launch posts — scored about 1 each. The first human visit with a referrer came later, from commenting on Indie Hackers.
04Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Human visits from launch“zero, or at best one” | 0 |
| r/microsaas launch posts analysedfrom 600 recent posts | 183 |
| Launch posts that survived77 of 183 | 42% |
| Median upvotes on a surviving postbest in the set: 19 | 1 |
| Spend | Not disclosed |
“Not disclosed” means the source doesn't say. We never estimate or fill in missing numbers.
05What worked — and what didn't
What worked
- Instrumenting the landing page first, so the result was a number, not a feeling
- Commenting brought the first visit with a referrer — one visit, not a trend
What didn't work
- Four launch posts: zero human visits
- Launching on r/microsaas: 58% of launch posts removed; survivors get about one upvote
- Trusting an analytics classifier without reading the rows
06Lessons
She can't separate a weak post or product from a weak channel with one launch — and says nobody recommending these venues has measured them either.
“The real number is zero, or at best one.”
07Source & evidence
- View original
Originally shared on Indie Hackers · Sep 24, 2026
Four launch posts, zero clicks. So I measured the places we're all told to launch
Public source. Extracted from publicly available content by the founder.
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