5 days post-launch: Top 50 on Product Hunt, zero signups, and why I think that's actually fine

This is super relatable. I launched on Product Hunt recently too and saw similar patterns — lots of traffic, few conversions. The key insight about top 50 not guaranteeing signups is spot on. Distribution channels matter more than launch hype. Curious: what is your long-term acquisition strategy after the initial PH bump fades?

Reading your replies down this thread, you've said three separate times that the messaging is the weak part — "my headline is too vague," "I don't think I put that across well," "it's partly a message problem." but the post itself diagnoses distribution. those are different problems and I think the thread has let you settle on the more comfortable one.

Distribution is comfortable because the fix is effort — show up in more threads, be more useful, grind. positioning is uncomfortable because the fix is admitting you can't yet say in one sentence why an Obsidian power user should move their vault. and if that sentence doesn't exist, showing up in r/ObsidianMD more often doesn't help. you'll just be present, and vague, in the exact room where your buyer is.
the tell is in your own answer to what the product is: "like Notion/Obsidian but AI native." that's a category comparison, not a pain. compare it to the sentence you wrote in the post — "someone frustrated with plugin complexity and MCP setup, who spent more time tweaking how Claude Code and Obsidian talk to each other than actually using it." that second one is the product. it's specific, it's a real 11pm feeling, and it's already in your writing — you just haven't put it on the page.

So before more thread-hunting: I'd fix the sentence first, precisely because the manual community path is the plan. the whole strategy depends on someone reading your comment, clicking, and immediately thinking "this is my exact mess." if the page can't do that in three seconds, every hour of community work leaks out the bottom. distribution multiplies positioning; it doesn't substitute for it.

What would it cost to just say the thing you said in the post — "I got tired of tweaking plugins instead of writing" — as the headline?

This is a really honest and useful post, Andy. 🔥
Top 50 on PH with zero signups is such a common but rarely talked about situation. Your distinction between awareness (PH) and acquisition (pain-moment communities) is spot on. I’ve seen the same thing — discovery browsers clap but don’t convert. The real users show up when someone is actively frustrated with their current solution.
The manual community approach feels slow and unsexy, but it’s probably the only honest way to get your first 10 real users from zero. Respect for not panicking and doubling down on the right work.
Wishing you luck with MinervaAI — the Obsidian power user angle feels strong.

The discovery-mode vs pain-mode distinction is the useful part here.

Launch pages tell you whether people are curious. Problem threads tell you whether someone is already trying to solve the thing today. Those are different signals, and it changes the comment you should leave: less "look what I built" and more "here is how I would debug the exact situation you're in."

For the next 10 users, are you planning to track the source by community/thread, or by the exact pain phrase that made someone click?

The "zero signups is fine" framing is the part I'd push on. A zero only tells you nothing when nobody's seen it — then you can't separate no-demand from no-reach. But you got Top 50 on PH, so you actually cleared the reach side. That makes this the uncomfortable kind of zero: closer to real signal than noise. It means the gap sits somewhere between the PH audience and the signup step, not in whether people can find you. Which is actually the better problem to have — reach worked, conversion didn't — versus the far more common trap where nothing's been seen yet and the zero could mean anything. But I wouldn't file it under fine either; a zero you can finally read is a thing to act on, not to sit with.

This matches what I see with AI-built apps too. Launch traffic is usually curiosity; first users come from a moment of pain.

One filter I use now: before polishing the landing page again, check whether the product can survive one real paid action. Who signs in, who owns the record, what action costs money, what happens if it fails, and can support trace it later?

I work on SettleMesh, so my bias is toward this launch-layer checklist: auth, database records, usage billing, checkout/top-up, and a visible history of paid actions. It is less exciting than the demo, but it is often the difference between "cool build" and "someone can actually pay for this."

Interesting insight, wonder what percentage of people on PH must be coming to genuinely find a solution to their pain point, that data would be great to have.

The zero-signups-but-fine framing is interesting — I just went through something similar validating an idea before building it out fully. Did the lack of signups actually change your roadmap, or are you sticking with the original plan regardless? Curious how much weight you're putting on early numbers vs just gut feel at this stage.

This matches what I have seen building a coding agent tool. Product Hunt traffic clicks around and moves on, but the people who actually install something are usually in the middle of being annoyed by a specific bug or a specific gap in their current workflow. My best signups have come from replying to someone complaining about an agent that merged a change nobody actually reviewed, not from any launch day spike. The distinction between discovery mode and pain mode is exactly right, and it also changes what you write when you show up. In a Reddit thread you are answering their actual problem, on a launch page you are asking strangers to care about yours.

Really interesting experience, thanks for sharing.

We're currently launching a new product line in our company, and I'm also building my own product on the side, so I've been thinking a lot about Product Hunt recently.

I always assumed it could be a great source of early users, but your post makes a strong case that it's primarily an awareness channel rather than an acquisition channel.

Definitely gives me something to think about before planning our launch.

yeah this is basically what I'm running into too, just from a different angle. my people (POD sellers) don't really browse launch feeds at all, they're in random facebook groups and discord servers tied to whatever platform they sell on. and they're not looking for tools, they're asking "did anyone else get their listing pulled for this" type questions.
so instead of thinking "where do I launch" I've been trying to think "where is this specific problem already being talked about right now" - way smaller list, way slower, but probably the only thing that actually converts. PH traffic is other makers checking out what you built, not someone in the middle of dealing with the actual problem.

this is such a common one and honestly it makes sense - product hunt traffic is mostly other makers and tire-kickers, not people with your actual problem and a credit card out. top 50 with 0 signups usually isn't a product problem, it's that the audience was wrong. signups come from being in front of people who were already looking for the thing, not people browsing a launch feed. where does your actual target hang out day to day?

This is exactly what I'm starting to realize too.

Product Hunt gives awareness, but not always people who are actively feeling the pain right now. The line about finding people at the moment they're already expressing the problem is probably the most important part.

I'm in a similar stage with Ashive, and I'm starting to think the real work is not getting more visitors, but finding founders who are already saying the problem out loud somewhere.

After a lot of helpful feedback, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has taken the time out of their day to offer their thoughts - it is much appreciated!

Day 2 post-launch here (also went the PH route yesterday), so no wisdom — just solidarity and two early observations.

Your "awareness vs acquisition" framing matches what I'm seeing. The only thing that felt like acquisition so far: answering the few questions people actually asked, fast and in public. One commenter's question exposed a real gap in my terms — I changed the policy the same day and said so in the thread. No signup from it yet, but it's the first interaction that moved trust instead of vanity metrics.

The other bet I'm making: my product's pain moment is predictable but rare (people only need a name when they're starting something), so instead of chasing that moment through threads, I generated a static SEO page per catalog item — the search result is already sitting there when the moment hits. Slow, compounding, zero marginal effort. Ask me in three months whether it worked.

Following for the first-10-users answers.

This tracks with what I've seen in dev-tool and productivity spaces. One distinction worth adding: not all "pain moment" threads convert the same way — someone asking "is there something better than Smart Connections" is actively shopping, and they'll try two or three tools that week and keep whichever gets them a working result in the first few minutes. So the reply you drop in that thread matters less than what happens in the first session after signup. I'd also gently push back on "no capture" — even a lightweight vault-scan tool or waitlist gate means the PH awareness doesn't fully evaporate, since you can nurture it later with the same content you're already writing for Reddit/Discord. Have you started tracking which specific communities or thread types are actually converting versus just generating clicks, or is it still too early to tell where the manual effort is paying off?

the discovery-vs-pain framing is right, but I'd reframe the zero signups one more notch: PH didn't fail because it's awareness not acquisition, it failed because that awareness had nowhere to land. top 50 means a few thousand people saw it and some bookmarked it, and with no capture that whole warm audience just evaporated. even a dumb email capture (notify me when X ships, a changelog list) turns browsers-in-discovery into people you can re-activate later, which is exactly when you have the pain-moment stuff worth sending them.

and the manual thread-hunting works but it's a trickle, since you're waiting for someone to post. the version that compounds is writing the answer to those exact 11pm sentences (smart connections alternative, obsidian plugin that reads my whole vault) as content, so you intercept the same intent on autopilot instead of refreshing reddit forever. hunt threads to find the sentences, publish so you stop having to hunt.

The discovery mode vs pain mode framing is spot on. One thing that helped me was treating those pain threads as copy research, not just lead gen. The exact sentence people type at 11pm usually belongs on the landing page almost verbatim. I built DictaFlow, and some of our best messaging came straight from real complaints like, "I know what I want to say, I just don't want to type it all." When the wording on the page matches the wording in the thread, the jump from comment to signup gets a lot smaller.

This matches my experience almost exactly. My first (and so far only) paying client didn't come from any platform — it was a warm referral from someone who already trusted me. Every channel I "built" produced awareness and zero revenue. But I'd add one harder layer to your framing: finding the person expressing the problem isn't always enough. I found mine, they fit on paper... and I've since learned they don't feel the pain hard enough for the price to make sense. So the real filter isn't just "is this person talking about the problem" — it's "does this problem cost them enough that solving it is a no-brainer." Awareness → intent → acute pain. Skip the last one and you get polite upvotes and no signups even from the right-looking people. Rooting for MinervaAI — the slow, show-up-where-they-hurt path is the honest one.

yeah i get it, i'm 18 building my own thing rn and it's crazy how everyone talks about launching but not what happens after

what made you decide to build for obsidian users specifically

PH rewards browsing, not pain, so your read is right. One step further: don't just show up in those Reddit and Discord threads, offer to personally onboard people on a call and do the setup for them. I started my first company doing free migrations for businesses in a bind, and hands-on work converted to paying contracts faster than any marketing ever did.

The community-search strategy makes sense, but I'd make the landing page do the same job once those people click through.
Right now your post is sharper than the page. In the post, the wedge is very specific: Obsidian power users who like local markdown but are tired of plugin complexity, MCP setup, and weak AI context. On the page, the first line is broader: "AI that creates notes, manages your calendar, and builds widgets."
I'd test a hero closer to the pain you're hunting for: "Obsidian-style markdown notes, with AI that actually understands your vault." Then make the first CTA choice obvious: try web vs download Windows.
If you reply in those pain threads, the page should feel like it was written for that exact complaint.

Living this right now. 6 upvotes on Product Hunt, 826 LinkedIn discovery, 0 sign-ups. I've stopped treating zero sign-ups as failure and started treating it as data. The posts aren't converting because I'm broadcasting features to people who aren't actively searching for a solution. The shift I'm making this week: research calls where I just ask 'how do you handle SOWs today?' — no pitch, no demo. The sign-ups will come after I learn their language, not after I build feature #38

Wowwwww. Thanks a lot for the insight. Discovery vs Pain Mode. I've never thought of it that way

The "discovery mode vs pain mode" framing is exactly right and I
don't think enough people talk about it. Product Hunt validates
that something exists. It doesn't find people who need it right now.
The manual community approach is slow but it's the only one that
actually works at zero. The founders I've seen get their first 10
users fastest are the ones who stopped trying to broadcast and
started showing up in the exact thread where someone was already
complaining about the problem.
Five days post launch with no signups is completely normal. The
launch is not the moment, it's just the starting gun.

The PH ranking without traction is such a clean lesson — it means the algorithm liked you, but the market didn't show up. The gap usually points to either audience-platform misalignment (right product, wrong room) or messaging that doesn't resonate with PH's specific crowd. Curious: did you see any signal about which PH users engaged vs. bounced? That delta often tells you where the real audience actually is.

The distinction you drew between awareness and acquisition is something I hadn't articulated before but immediately recognized as true.

I'm pre-launch on a behavioral AI product and I've been thinking about Product Hunt as a launch destination. Reading this I realize I was conflating the two — thinking visibility would convert to users because the product is genuinely useful. But useful to whom, and are they in pain right now, are different questions entirely.

You've already worked out the thing that usually takes people six months and a wasted ad budget to learn, so you're further along than the silence makes it feel.

On what actually moved the needle for first users for us (I run Automateed, an AI book creator), it was almost exactly the shift you're describing, with one refinement: answer the question without leading with your product. In the "is there something better than X" threads, the replies that converted were the ones that were genuinely useful even if the person never clicked through, and where I named competitors honestly next to us. Being the founder who says "honestly, for your exact case, tool Y fits you better than mine" builds more trust in one comment than ten landing-page tweaks. The right people notice, and they remember the name.

Two things that worked better than I expected:

Answer publicly, never DM. If the reply is good, the lurkers reading that thread six months later are a bigger audience than the OP. A lot of our signups trace back to old comments people found through Google, not the original poster.

Pick 3-4 communities and actually live in them. Being a recognizable regular who happens to have built something beats spraying one comment across 20 subreddits. Reputation compounds; drive-by links don't.

The slow manual path IS the path. It doesn't scale, which is exactly why it works from zero, nobody can shortcut past you on it. Which community is your Obsidian power user actually sitting in all day? That's the whole game from here.

This feels like a healthy way to look at a launch. Getting attention is one signal, but it is not the same as getting someone to trust a new tool enough to change their workflow. For a knowledge-base product, that trust gap is probably the real challenge. People are not just testing software, they are touching their notes, habits and existing system.

That makes the manual community route feel right. It may not scale at first, but it shows you the hesitation up close.

PH top 50 with zero signups is a brutal but common gap — usually means traffic ≠ ICP, or the landing page answers curiosity but not "why act now."

What's your product and who did you expect to sign up from PH vs who actually showed up? Curious if it's a channel problem or a message problem.

This hit me really hard because I lived this almost exactly. Launched Wealtii (a digital asset index fund platform) a few weeks ago and had the same moment of staring at a silent dashboard after 10 months of building solo.

The realization you described is 100% right. Product Hunt is a clapping audience, not a customer base. The claps feel amazing but nobody in discovery mode has a credit card out.

What actually moved the needle for me was embarrassingly simple. I went back to people I had personally spoken to before launch, the ones who had said "wow this sounds cool," and I just followed up with one line. "Hey, it is live. Would love your honest take." Not a pitch. Not a newsletter. A human message to a real person.

Three of my first five users came from that single follow up.

The second thing that worked was going into communities and asking questions, not answering them. I would find threads about investing frustrations and just genuinely participate. No link drops. Just real conversation. People came to my profile, saw what I was building, and converted naturally.

The manual grind you described IS the growth strategy at this stage. It is not a temporary phase before the "real" growth starts. For a lot of us, it IS the real growth for the first hundred users.

Congrats on Top 50 organically by the way. That is a real signal even if signups did not follow. It means the framing works. Now it is just about finding the people who are already in pain.

Good luck with MinervaAI, genuinely cool product. 🚀

This resonates with me too, i launched my beta test few days back. No signups, no users, no testers. Havent tried Product Hunt yet, maybe that would get my app into traction?

This matches my week almost exactly. I'm a few days into launching a dev tool for people migrating off Bubble, and the pattern is identical: generic channels produce views, specific ones produce conversations.

What's actually moved the needle so far: posting in the official Bubble forum (where the pain literally lives) got a pricing question within hours — buying intent, not upvotes. Meanwhile Reddit's spam filter ate my launch post from a low-karma account, and what passed the next day was a link-free post that just told the story. The most surprising one: going back to a 4-month-old thread where people had asked me questions I never answered, and answering them. Two of those replies turned into real conversations, including one with an agency owner.

So +1 to your thesis: one person mid-pain in a niche community beats a thousand discovery-mode browsers. The uncomfortable part is that it doesn't scale — but at 0→10 users, nothing is supposed to scale anyway.

I like your point that product hunt is awareness, not acquisition. Looking back , if you could restart from day one , would you skip product hunt entirely until you already had 10-20 active users ?

The part nobody's pushed back on yet: for a product with real switching cost like yours, "show up where the pain is expressed" might still be too passive. An Obsidian power user has already sunk months into their setup, so what's stopping them isn't hearing about you, it's the risk of moving their whole vault. That's a trust problem more than an awareness one. The move that fits is one level more manual than posting: offer to migrate someone's vault with them on a 20-minute call. Five of those beat fifty upvotes, and you'll learn more from them too.

Two watering holes specific to your person that you didn't list: r/ObsidianMD and the Obsidian Discord, where "is there something better than Smart Connections" gets asked most days. Same interception idea, pre-sorted by niche.

One diagnostic before you write the launch off: of the PH traffic, do you know how many clicked through to the site vs just upvoted? Zero signups from 200 clicks is a landing problem; zero from 5 clicks is the distribution problem
you're describing. Different leaks, different fixes.

I agree with this: I suspect a lot of people here are in the same five-days-post-launch silence, and I wanted to say: I think it's normal, and I think the work is just beginning. I just started recently and I'm even offering the first 3 products for free and no one has contacted me yet.

We got to prepare a while for the PH Launch buddy, there are even strategists for this

This landed for me because I'm in the same silence right now — launched my free tool this morning, got 113 views on the launch post, zero conversions. Same lesson, same day: browsers aren't buyers.
One thing I'd add to your "find them at the moment they're expressing the problem" framing: for some products, that moment isn't a Reddit thread — it's a Google search. My tool solves a deadline/penalty problem, and the person who needs it is typing "missed my LLC filing deadline" at 11pm, exactly like you said. So my version of your strategy is SEO pages that answer that exact search, one per pain point. Same principle — intercept the expressed problem — but the interception point is a search results page instead of a Discord message. Slower to start, but it compounds and doesn't require me to be online at the right moment.
The manual community route you're describing has one trap worth naming since you'll be living in it: answer the person's question completely before the product mention, every time. The threads where I've seen this work, the product link reads like a footnote to genuinely useful help. The moment it reads like the reason you showed up, the thread turns on you.
Also — five days post-PH with Top 50 and no signups doesn't mean the product's wrong. It means PH was the wrong room. You clearly know that now, which puts you ahead of most.

You worked out the right lesson faster than most. Directories are awareness, and demand lives at the moment someone is actively describing the pain. I would only add two things.

First, the hard part of showing up in those threads is being useful without pitching. The instant it reads like an ad you get ignored or removed, so the move is to answer the actual question well and let people click through on their own. Slower, but those are the ones who convert.

Second, do not fully write off the launch. Top 50 with no squad is a real signal, and the page keeps working as a credibility artifact and a link long after launch day. Zero signups on day 5 is a distribution problem, not a product verdict.

The reframe that helped me was to treat launch as the thing that earns you permission to show up in the pain threads, not the thing that is supposed to convert on its own.

The awareness vs acquisition split matches what I see with paid video too. A hook can get someone to stop scrolling, that's awareness. Whether they convert depends on if the hook matched the pain they already had, not the pain you assumed they had. Founders often test one hook and call it done instead of testing angles against each other.

This is a really honest takeaway. Top 50 sounds like a win, but zero signups shows the difference between attention and actual intent.
I’m learning something similar with my own SaaS. People seeing the product is not the same as people needing it right now.
The part that stood out to me is finding users at the exact moment they’re already describing the problem. That feels much stronger than just launching and hoping the right person happens to notice.
Slow and manual probably feels frustrating, but it may be the cleanest way to find the first real users. Especially when the product needs trust before someone changes their workflow.

I think the biggest realization here is that Product Hunt answered "Will people notice this exists?"—not "Will people adopt it?"

Your point about meeting people at the moment they're actively describing the problem feels much closer to how early B2B products find their first users. At that stage, solving someone's existing frustration is usually a stronger acquisition channel than trying to create interest from scratch.