@NikkiElizDemere @jerschneid pretty sure
— Michael St James (@michaelstjames) November 4, 2014
It was a couple hours earlier than I usually wake up, so in my bleary eyed state I eventually figured out that Decoy Digits was just featured on Product Hunt! I had actually submitted it about 6 weeks earlier, but it turns out another user had heard of us through reddit and it was his post that got featured.
It was a pretty exciting day, and I fanned the flames by posting to /r/startups to share my story as well. Below I would like to share some stats about what our traffic looked like before, during and after.
Here's what the month of traffic looks like:
Those with a very trained eye may be able to spot the first spike there on November 4th. That was the day we were on Product Hunt. I'll talk more about that second spike in a minute. Some stats:
- 18: Average daily sessions the week before being featured on Product Hunt
- 2,624: Daily sessions on November 4th (the day we were featured)
- 701: Daily sessions one day later (73% drop from the day before)
- 167: Daily sessions two days later (73% drop from the day before)
- 83: Daily sessions three days later (50% drop from the day before)
- 7: Top rank on Product Hunt (that I noticed)
- 10: Average rank on Product Hunt throughout the day (more or less)
- 1: Top rank on /r/startups
- 20: Hours spent as the top spot on /r/startups
- 82: Points on the /r/startups post
- 84: Percent upvoted
As you can see it was a pretty big jump that first day, then died off pretty soon. The hour by hour is interesting as well:
The biggest hour was 188 sessions (3 per minute) at 10am. Interestingly, you don't seem to see a dip during night and another peak the next morning. It just trails off smoothly back to a steady state.
The traffic sources of the day look like this:
And the referrals break down like this:
Note that reddit doesn't appear in the above chart because it the "Social" section of Google Analytics. Reddit produced 794 sessions, compared with 949 from Product Hunt. See the social breakdown here:
Now, what about that SECOND spike from the first chart, you ask? That is actually when we got featured on fuckinghomepage.com where we were listed as website of the day and Johnny instructed his visitors to GIVE SOMEONE-ASS FAKE DIGITS.
Other cool stuff? Before this visibility, it was pretty hard to find us on Google, but as of when I just checked were were #2 on Google for the term "fake phone number" (without the quotes).
In the last week we have been averaging about 90 visits per day, a 400% increase than the week before we hit Product Hunt home page. Overall, the exposure has been awesome for us! We're not quite making a million dollars just yet, but it was a great jump start to get some consistent daily traffic and a lot of incoming phone calls.
