Stats of Coding Font Launch

Week 7 of Founding Typogram

Greetings, friends! Welcome to my newsletter, where I share how I build apps and my startup company Typogram.

Last week we launched a free app called Coding Font! Today I want to share the launch stats so far and what I planned for the future. If you are interested in how I build the project with Low Code, I also published a post here.

Stats from Launch and After

• 36,729 users visited codingfont.com, 

  • 22,000 on Launch day

• Among the traffic with a referral source

  • 43% from Hacker News

  • 16% from Reddit, primarily from this post

  • 7% from coliss.com

  • 6% from GeekNews

  • 6% from Twitter and Facebook shares

  • 4% from Product Hunt

A few data points surprised me:

• Traffic from Product Hunt is low, only accounting for 4% of the referral traffic and 2% of the overall traffic.

This was the first time I got onto the front page of Product Hunt, so I didn’t know what to expect and had false high hopes. The competition on PH is fierce. Within 10 minutes after PH started counting votes, one of the products got more than 100 votes, where my app got a single-digit number of votes. Throughout the day, my app’s placement steadily fluctuated between 15 and 16, while the number of votes slowly climbed up to 230. Product Hunt launch is the one I spent the most mental energy on. In hindsight, I overestimated the importance of the PH launch and spent too much time and energy planning. However, traffic is traffic; I don’t think I should give up on the Product Hunt launch in the future. Instead, I could optimize the workflow to maximize the return on investment. I included a helpful resource on Product Hunt Launch in this week’s Founders’ Besties.  

• High traffic from Korea and Japan, generated by postings on coliss.com (Japan) and GeekNews (Korea)

I had a similar experience with CSS Icon launch when it got posted on a forum in Russia and got a lot of traffic from there. My co-founder, Hua, also woke up to a huge wave of sign-up to her newsletter after being covered by Nexo – a major Brazilian news site. I want to plan a more international launch in the future – post on regional news aggregators like coliss.com and GeekNews. I need to gather more sites like that and then get the launch post translated. Maybe there could be a service that helps founders do that? It could be a great business opportunity! If you know of regional sites similar to Hacker News, please send them to me – I will compile them into a list and share it with everyone in the upcoming newsletter.

Future Features

I have gotten many feature requests over on discussion forums. While I continue to gather them, here are some of the ones that I captured:

• Hide font names – done, added this on launch day!

• Show the entire bracket map after game is over

• Show analytics of the most popular winner fonts

• Include more coding fonts, such as Hack, Iosevka, etc

• Include proportional fonts

• Synchronize scrolling within the code samples

• Separate font size sliders for the two fonts in a match

• Allow changing code snippets, or type your own code

• Allow line-height adjustment

• Controls to turn on/off ligatures, such as ==, ===, >=, =>, -> 

• Support italic in the code samples

These are great suggestions. I will be working on the next release to support them! If you have a feature request - I would love to hear about it; simply reply to this email to let me know!

How Can I Improve SEO?

I really need some help and pointers on SEO. My domain is codingfont.com, and yet when I search “Coding Font,” on Google, the app is nowhere to be found, even after I clicked into the 10th page! How do I improve the SEO for my site? If you have some clue or a pointer to learning materials, please send it my way. I am reading through Google’s official guide on Search, which I included in this week’s Founders’ Besties. 

Final Words: Thank you! 

I couldn't say enough – thank you for checking out the app, giving an upvote, sharing, telling a friend. It means the world to me, and I cannot do this without you. Thank you again!

Founders’ Besties

- a weekly listicle of helpful links for startup founders!

Google Search Console

Link: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

Official toolings and guides from Google to help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.

PH Launch Resource 

Link: https://phlaunch.pory.app/

This is an excellent website with tweets threads about tips on and success stories of launching on Product Hunt. I learned the most from this tweet, which is also on the site.

Low Code Development: A Short History

Link: https://hackernoon.com/low-code-programming-through-the-ages

This helpful article goes over the history of Low Code with examples from the past. I learned a lot from this article -- Did you know that low-code goes three decades back? 

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