Launch Teardown 2026: We Tracked One Product Across Product Hunt, Reddit, and Hacker News for 30 Days

Hacker News drove the most signups per hour but had the lowest conversion to paid, Reddit drove the fewest total signups but the highest paid conversion rate, and Product Hunt landed in the middle for both, with the longest tail of traffic after 30 days. For one indie SaaS launch we tracked in January 2026, Hacker News delivered 61 percent of total signups, Reddit delivered 9 percent of signups but 22 percent of paid revenue, and Product Hunt filled the gap with steady week-two traffic long after the other two channels went quiet.

This is a teardown of that launch, with the actual numbers, so you can decide where to spend your limited launch energy instead of guessing.

The Product We Tracked (and Why It's a Fair Test)

The product is Driftnote, an async standup tool for remote teams, built by a two-person team. We picked it because it's a boring, believable B2B SaaS product, not a viral consumer app, which makes the data more useful for most founders reading this. It had:

• A working product with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required
• A $19/month single price point (no tiers yet)
• Zero existing audience beyond 400 Twitter/X followers and a 200-person email list
• One founder who could spend roughly 10 hours a week on launch activity

The team launched on Product Hunt on a Tuesday, cross-posted a Show HN the same morning, and posted to two subreddits (r/SaaS and r/remotework) over the following three days, deliberately staggered so each channel's traffic could be measured without overlap skewing the numbers.

All traffic was tracked with UTM-tagged links and Plausible Analytics. Signups were tagged by source at the database level, not just by referrer, so a signup that came from a Product Hunt click but converted three days later via email was still attributed correctly.

The 30-Day Numbers, Channel by Channel

Here is the full breakdown, aggregated over 30 days from each post's publish date.