Hey, George here! Being a developer I always wondered how other startups attract traffic. How long it takes to build up a substantial stream of visitors, and how those visitors convert. Or even how many visitors one gets by making a front page of Hacker News. That's why I built Tractionbeat, a place where founders can share and annotate traffic charts of their startups. I hope this will help a lot of talented developers and designers see how others managed to build up traffic over time and that giving up because of lack of initial traction is not justified. So far, there are 15 sites and apps on Tractionbeat and all of them give us extremely valuable information.
Check out Headway, a SaaS that is now getting thousands of daily visitors. Or very inspirational PlaceCard Me! that has been steadily and patiently working on SEO and after just a few months gets hundreds of visitors every day. I find examples like these both helpful and inspirational and I hope you will too!
Do you have questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below.
Awesome to see traction for some new startups, especially if they add annotations. I've added Headway and got some nice feedback and suggestions from random people about our traction progress.
Pros:
Annotations are a great insight to what others can do to get better stats
Cons:
If only more sites added annotations
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It's incredible how much value and nice insight you get from this! It's also fun to see and read the reasons for the different spikes. Oh and nice design, especially with the emojis ;) The site is already bookmarked :D
@frederikthede Thank you so much Frederik, glad you like the site! :)
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Well done ... love to see how other startups are growing and the annotations add great evidence for what works well and how much traffic different events generate for different types of products.
Would be great to standardise those events and then compare for those events across different websites .. eg. compare all "launched on producthunt" to see how they each spiked.
Could also find other events that similar websites have added that might be worth doing on my site. Great way to promote a service that works with evidence .. "See how we helped on tractionbeat" etc .. with a link to their event.
Love it.
@pgordon Paul, this is a great idea - I'm looking for ways to drive referral traffic and these backlinks might be a good source.
I'm still thinking about what to do with the "Traffic Spikes" page, doing comparison like you suggested would be certainly helpful for the community.
Thank you for your kind words and suggestions! Please stay tuned, more startups are coming soon.
Was one of the beta users of this site and really like it!
Pros:
Easy to use, nice styles, annotations are fun, open startups for the win!
Cons:
Nothing immediately comes to mind.
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Hi @grghannes
I'm personally a little bit confused.
From one point of view I like the idea of publicly sharing data from startups. Can be valuable for other startups and see "benchmark". Also I like annotations as some before me mentioned above. Question is if I really want to add them. Some annotations can be too valuable to add them publicly.
But on the other hand i don't see incentive to add data to the website. Simply because of my competitors and the fact that I can basically see anonymized benchmark data from Google Analytics benchmark report or just look at the SimiliarWeb for traffic..
I strongly recommend building basic SEO (it's really easy) from the beginning of launch. You're missing elementary Headings tags for example which you're losing small points to SEO in general.
Remeber to all: Both SEO and Inbound marketing are crucial from the start right at the moment when Google send robots to index your website. Lately you will noticed more issues to solve and you can easily forget to add basic SEO.
Anyway you got my upvote, I found it usefull in general, it's just doesn't convince me to add startup website in a role as a founder. Maybe you can try persuade me :)
Nice work!
Finisher
Chimp List Helper
Headway
Awesome to see traction for some new startups, especially if they add annotations. I've added Headway and got some nice feedback and suggestions from random people about our traction progress.
Pros:Annotations are a great insight to what others can do to get better stats
Cons:If only more sites added annotations
Finisher
Finisher
Chimp List Helper
Was one of the beta users of this site and really like it!
Pros:Easy to use, nice styles, annotations are fun, open startups for the win!
Cons:Nothing immediately comes to mind.
Softr
Finisher