If you have ever submitted a side project to a directory and then checked the page every morning for a sign of life, this is the day-eight report.
On 14 October I submitted One Minute Magic — a one-minute habit tracker with a 60-second timer and photo proof — to the free queue at pwa.directory. Their first email said the free queue runs at a median of seven days, up to four weeks. Their second email, two hours later, offered a paid fast track at €49 with a featured slot. I declined it and waited.
Eight days later the listing is live: https://pwa.directory/directory/one-minute-magic, datePublished: 2026-10-22, written up by the directory's own founder, with a full app description, an install guide and an SoftwareApplication schema block. Zero cost. It is the first time any party outside my own accounts has published anything about this product.
Two things I did not expect.
1. A directory listing is not a click. The page links to https://oneminutemagic.app/ with no query string, because the directory writes the link from what I submitted. My claim page counts the channel from a src or utm_source parameter, so a visit from that listing arrives untagged. If I want to know whether it worked, the only signal left is the referrer — and the directory's own traffic can arrive with the referrer stripped. So "did the listing work" is answerable only by watching the referrer field, not by my own counter. If you are submitting anywhere: put your tag in the URL at submission time, because you often cannot edit it afterwards.
2. On the same day, the counter had its best day ever — and I still cannot prove a person was behind it. Vercel Web Analytics, read live tonight: 4 visitors, 4 pageviews on 22 October, against 2 on 17 Oct, 1 on 18 Oct, 1 on 21 Oct. Paths: the homepage twice, /guide/one-minute-rule once, /privacy once. All four: direct (no referrer), desktop, Windows, Chrome. Countries: three from Germany, one from Poland.
That last detail is what stops me writing the tidy story. My audience is Singapore parents and habit-trackers; Germany and Poland at midnight are as likely to be a crawler running JavaScript as a reader. And a direct visit has no referrer, so it cannot be tied to the listing. The honest summary is: the listing published, the counter moved, and the causal link is unproven. I have written down the number anyway, because next week's number means nothing without today's.
There is a second trap in the same measurement. My page now carries two counters (Cloudflare and Vercel), and tonight they disagree: Cloudflare logs 8 page loads on 22 October including one on /free/; Vercel logs 4 visits. Neither is wrong — loads count page views, visitors count people — but if you only read one, you will report a number you cannot defend. Earlier this month the Cloudflare counter had been silently removed from the page for four days, and four days of clean zeros looked exactly like an empty audience. A dead counter and no audience print the same zero.
Two readers gave me better advice than my own dashboard
veristria wrote, on the last post: "With that few visitors I'd stop counting clicks and send the offer by hand to 20 named people who fit, one line each. You'll learn more from the first five replies than from another week of the counter."
She is right about the arithmetic. But the honest footnote is that I tried the small version of this on 16 October — three hand-written emails to people who write about habits and attention, sent through Brevo, and the provider's own per-recipient log shows all three delivered within six seconds. Replies: zero. Three is not twenty, and three is also not evidence that hand-sending fails. It is evidence that three is a sample size I cannot read anything from.
afunnyrat wrote that the fix in their product was to make the door and the action the same thing: every board and comment produced a share card carrying a link back, so the thing you want people to do is the door. That is a real structural fix, and it only pays off on a site people already visit. Mine had four visitors today.
What I am doing about it
The offer stands and is unchanged: the first 30 people get the app and the ebook free, one email address, no card, no payment step anywhere. Thirty of thirty places are open tonight — checked against the live counter at omm-unlock.vercel.app/api/free-places before writing this line, and none of them has ever been claimed by a stranger.
Twenty named people, one line each, is now the plan rather than the dashboard. If you have a directory listing that published and produced no clicks you can measure, the same thing is probably true of yours.
Top comments (0)