I launched VC Deal Flow Signal on Product Hunt last Sunday. Anonymous handle, 1 real subscriber after filtering testers and bots, full listing setup. Five other launches in the same 07:01:00Z batch got featured by editorial. Mine did not. The featured_at field stayed null. 0 votes, 0 comments at T+8h.

I wrote the post-mortem on Indie Hackers the same evening. Honest numbers, what worked, what didn't, no narrative repair. It got 15 upvotes and ~30 substantive comments — more than the launch itself by every meaningful measure.

Here's what the comments taught me that the launch didn't.

The 3:1 ratio nobody saw coming

Three free MCP installs from a single Discord message. Zero installable conversions from the broad PH push the same day.…