The case at a glance
- Product: $29/month project management tool for small dev teams. Flat price, no tiers, no demo call.
- Product Hunt launch: 200 visits, 3 signups, 0 conversions.
- Month 3: $800 MRR, 28 users, all traced to comments in three subreddits.
- Month 4–5: $4,200 MRR after 8 comparison posts, 4–6 hours each.
- Month 8: $22,000 claimed MRR, 340 paying users, $0 paid ads.
- Time split: 70% distribution, 30% product. His month-4 posts are still his top traffic pages 10 months later.
He describes the product as unremarkable in the most crowded software category on earth, which is exactly why the standard launch motion returned zero. Stack undisclosed, but the reproducible version is Astro or Ghost, Stripe Checkout, Buttondown, Search Console, and a plaintext file of repeated questions. Under $25/month.
One flag before you copy anything: 340 users × $29 is $9,860, not $22,000. A commenter asked. He never answered. Treat the headline as claimed, not verified, and take the shape of the curve instead of the number at the end of it.
What he's actually selling (it isn't a project management tool)
The product isn't the app. The product is a maintained public opinion about which tool wins for which team, and he happens to sell one of the tools.
That mechanism works for three reasons stacked on top of each other. "Jira vs [competitor] for small teams" is a query typed by someone with a card already out and a shortlist already formed, so you're buying demand at the decision moment rather than renting attention upstream of it. Competitor brand names are also the cheapest keywords available in a saturated category, because every incumbent is too proud to rank for its rivals.
The third reason is the one most people skip. His posts say plainly when the competitor is the better choice, which means he loses prospects on purpose. That loss is the price of being believed for the 30 seconds when he says "us." It's also why Hacker News shared one of them and sent 3,000 visits in a day. Nobody has ever shared a brochure.
Every competitor in that category publishes claims. He published judgment.