Our Product Hunt launch returned 2 upvotes and 0 signups. Here is every number.

On August 19 we launched LeadAce on Product Hunt. It was our first launch to an English speaking audience. I am writing down the numbers while they are still uncomfortable, because the posts I found most useful when I was preparing were the ones that did this.

We are a small software company in Tokyo. LeadAce is an outbound sales agent that runs as a Claude Code plugin. The backend is open source. It has been in Public Beta since the launch.

The numbers

Product Hunt, 24 hours:

• 2 upvotes
• 1 comment, which was mine
• Day rank #160, week rank #758
• 3 followers on the product page

Signups from the launch: 0.

Site traffic for the four weeks up to launch day: 6 active users, 27 page views. Referrers were direct 4, producthunt.com 1, t.co 1.

Our X account over the same four weeks: 48 posts, 576 impressions total, 2 link clicks, 2 new followers.

So the launch did not fail at the landing page. It failed before that. Almost nobody arrived.

Where we got stopped

This is the part I did not plan for. I spent weeks on the product, the demo video, the gallery images and the copy. Every one of those was ready. What I did not have was accounts.

Hacker News. I could not post Show HN at all. HN was limiting Show HN submissions from low karma accounts, and my account had karma 1. I created it years ago and never used it. There is no way to buy your way past this, and there should not be.

r/ClaudeAI. My first attempt was removed by automod because the account was too new. I tried again from my older Reddit account, which has an age of 5 years but karma 1. A moderator locked it. The subreddit requires 50 total karma to post a Showcase on the feed. They pointed me to a megathread instead, which is the correct call on their side. My comment there got 67 views and 1 upvote in 19 hours.

r/SaaS. The post went through, but Reddit's pre-submit check warned me that it might break the rules on vendor spam. I removed every link from the body and changed the ending to a real question. That version posted fine. It is now the post with the most discussion of anything we published.

r/selfhosted. Blocked by a rule I should have read first. Projects less than three months old can only go in the New Project Megathread. Our public repo was created on May 28, so we reach three months on August 28. We will post then.

The pattern is the same in every case. The gate was not the quality of the post. The gate was account history, and account history takes months of ordinary participation that I had not done.

What actually worked

Two subreddits let us in, and both were worth more than Product Hunt.

r/SideProject and r/SaaS produced real questions from people who read the post. One of them changed the roadmap on the same day.

Someone asked about pricing. The tiers all have a hard monthly cap. When you hit the cap, sending stops. They asked whether the accounts sending 200 emails a month are structurally different from the ones sending 4,000, or whether it is the same customer at different stages. Writing the reply is what made the problem visible to me. A hard stop at the cap is lost revenue for me and a bad moment for the user at the same time. Metered overage on top of the flat tier went on the roadmap that evening.

Another asked about prompt injection, which is the right question for this product. The agent reads a prospect's website and then writes an email. So a hostile page is an instruction source. My answer was that the send step only uses the stored record, and the server enforces quotas, do-not-contact, the country allowlist, email verification and the compliance footer. The model cannot skip those even if a page fools it. A hostile page could still poison one prospect's record or make one email strange. It cannot trigger mass sends. I said I would harden the research step, and that is now a real task instead of a vague worry.

Neither of those conversations needed traffic to happen. Six upvotes and a dozen comments were enough.

The checklist I did not have

If you are planning a launch, check the account requirements before you write anything. This is the table I wish I had:

I hit a fifth wall while writing this post. I made an Indie Hackers account so I could post there too. New accounts cannot create posts at all. You unlock that by leaving thoughtful comments until a moderator picks you, or by paying for Indie Hackers Plus. I did not know that before I signed up.

The fix is boring. Pick the three channels that matter for your product, and start commenting on them six weeks before you launch. Not promoting. Commenting. Your karma on launch day is a thing you build in advance, like a mailing list.

What I am doing next

I am not going to run the launch again. Instead:

1. Daily replies on X to posts about Claude Code and AI agents, with something useful in each one. Our single highest performing post in four weeks was a reply to someone else, at 65 impressions against an average of 12. When you have no followers, the only path to an audience is someone else's.
2. Ordinary participation on HN and Reddit from the accounts that will be used for the next launch. Karma first, launch second.
3. r/selfhosted on August 28, when the project is old enough.
4. Writing down the numbers, like this post.

The product side of the launch was fine. The distribution side started from zero, and I did not notice that zero was a number I had to fix in advance.

If you launched recently and hit the same wall, I would like to know which channels let you in. I will post our next set of numbers whether they are better or not.

LeadAce is at leadace.ai. The source is at github.com/aitit-inc/leadace.