Three weeks ago we launched Deckgauge in public. I promised the numbers, so here they all are.
The setup: Deckgauge is self-hosted, source-available engineering intelligence — one board over Jira, GitHub, GitLab and Azure DevOps, with DORA metrics and per-engineer workload. We launched it on Product Hunt, a Reddit megathread, dev.to, a couple of listing sites, and got covered by a YouTube channel. Total ad spend: $54.
The numbers, all of them:
- GitHub: 27 stars, 3 forks (it was 1 star before launch)
- Site traffic: 183 users in September. August gave us 61. That difference is the entire launch: a Reddit comment, four articles, one listing site, and one video. No spike, no front page — just a slope.
- Launch article on dev.to: 32 views, 2 reactions
- The three articles after it: 10 views, 0, and 10
- Comments on all of that combined: essentially zero
- Paying customers: 0
What actually moved traffic:
The single best source wasn't a submission form. It was a YouTuber with 55,000 subscribers demoing the board on screen for 38 seconds — The Next New Thing, who found the repo, argued with me about whether it should exist, then demoed it anyway. Direct traffic more than doubled the day after the video.
Every directory and submission channel we paid or applied for produced less than that one unpaid segment.
(One honesty note: the analytics undercounts EEA traffic due to consent gating. If anything, the real numbers are slightly better.)
What I'd do differently:
- Publish this numbers post earlier. The weeks of silence in the middle are where you start doubting, and the data says the slope was there the whole time.
- Comment in existing threads instead of publishing more articles. Four articles got 52 views; one well-placed comment on a busy thread reaches more people.
- Fire the big swing sooner. Show HN is still ahead of us.
Why publish small numbers at all:
Because nobody else does. Every launch story you read is a spike. Nobody publishes the 0-comment weeks, so everyone launching thinks they're the only one failing. Three weeks in, 27 people starred a repo that had 1 star at launch, and I watched every single one arrive.
The repo is here if you want to be the 28th: https://github.com/Codpal-Limited/deckgauge — and there's a live demo with a fictional 25-person org at https://demo.deckgauge.com.
I'm Yaniv — fractional CTO, and I build this in public. Next numbers post in three weeks, whatever they say.
Top comments (1)
The YouTuber vs. every directory comparison is the most useful number in the post. Since 38 seconds of a demo worked, are you thinking of finding more people who talk about DORA metrics publicly and showing them the board one by one?