u/Few-Penalty-6102

Hey all, I built adaptlypost, a social media scheduling app. Launched in early January, my first instinct was paid ads. Tried Facebook, both failed miserably, moved to Google Ads, hasn't worked out either. Submitted my website to directories, started posting about it on Twitter, made some blog pages and free tools. Result: traffic went up, but still no users, no conversions, so I gave up on it and moved on.

A couple weeks later I stumbled across a few tweets about Open Claw. Since I'd already exposed the API for my scheduler I decided to make a skill for it. Took me no more than a day to make an OpenClaw skill, an mcp, an npx skill, and make some API adjustments, submitted to clawhub without thinking much of it.

The result exceeded all my expectations. Went from basically $0 to $300 MRR with 50 free trials in the next few weeks.

The OpenClaw frenzy is dead now. Don't see much traffic from it anymore, but lesson learned: months of "doing it the right way" did less for me than one weekend riding a trend. Worth looking out for what's exploding.

Hey all, I built AdaptlyPost, a social media scheduling app. Launched in early January, my first instinct was paid ads. Tried Facebook, both failed miserably, moved to Google Ads, hasn't worked out either. Submitted my website to directories, started posting about it on Twitter, made some blog pages and free tools. Result: traffic went up, but still no users, no conversions, so I gave up on it and moved on.

A couple weeks later I stumbled across a few tweets about Open Claw. Since I'd already exposed the API for my scheduler I decided to make a skill for it. Took me no more than a day to make an OpenClaw skill, an mcp, an npx skill, and make some API adjustments, submitted to clawhub without thinking much of it.

The result exceeded all my expectations. Went from basically $0 to $300 MRR with 50 free trials in the next few weeks.

https://preview.redd.it/snug4uu41o2h1.png?width=3824&format=png&auto=webp&s=f522358fc85e88576f08b0e1b590dccc054c5a27

The OpenClaw frenzy is dead now. Don't see much traffic from it anymore, but lesson learned: months of "doing it the right way" did less for me than one weekend riding a trend. Worth looking out for what's exploding even if it doesn't really fit the roadmap.

Founders and marketers spend so much time on visits, impressions, and ranking positions. Those numbers are useful, but they don't tell you whether your content is actually helping the business grow.

I learned this the hard way. A page can pull in great traffic and produce almost no revenue. Another can get a fraction of that traffic and quietly drive your highest-value customers. If you only look at traffic, you end up optimizing the wrong pages and making decisions based on vanity metrics.

Took me a while to find a tool that ties content performance to actual revenue. Ended up using Flowsery, which connects pages to Stripe payments so you can see which posts are bringing in paying customers, not just clicks.

It genuinely changes how you think about content. Instead of "which post got the most views?" the question becomes "which post brought in the best customers?" You start doubling down on the few that drive revenue and cutting the ones that look good on paper but do nothing for the bottom line.

Revenue per visitor and per-page conversion is way more useful than staring at traffic graphs all day.

Growth isn't about more people visiting your site. It's about understanding which pages move someone closer to buying.

I added Arcjet to my Flowsery analytics website to filter bots, 100k blocked in a couple of days. Would have cost me a fortune to keep, so I had to build the basics myself.

Here is what I did, all of it free.

1. User-agent filtering. Most bots are honest about themselves, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, AhrefsBot, etc, just block them. Also block null user-agents and obviously broken ones.

2. Display size validation. A real device does not have a 10000x10000 screen, and it usually has a reasonable aspect ratio. Filter out the weird ones, they're either headless browsers or scrapers that didn't bother to set realistic viewport.

3. Datacenter IP blocking. This is the big one. Use MaxMind GeoLite2 ASN database (free), block IPs from AWS, GCP, Azure, OVH, Hetzner, DigitalOcean etc. Also block my own infra, I had 0 attributions from my own server (which was 100% of my "users" before I added the block).

4. Behavioral signals. Fast bounces, no scroll, weird browser versions, dozens of params. I attach a bot score to every session, so I have a toggle in the dashboard that shows "probably bots filtered".

The big trick was proxying the real client IP through Cloudflare to my backend on Fly. Without that, every visitor looks like they are coming from the closest Cloudflare CDN, which is useless for both attribution and bot detection.

Result: 96% of what Arcjet would catch, filtered out before it ever hits my DB. No paid service involved. Took a couple of weekends.

Arcjet is a great product, but for a side project analytics use case, you can roll the basics yourself.

I've recently seen a post where a founder showed a screenshot from the Cloudflare console with ~500k unique visitors, the reality however is much more mundane.

Here is the Cloudflare screenshot from my project, 100k Visitors in the last 30 days, impressive:

https://preview.redd.it/09qgkrjh1p1h1.png?width=1776&format=png&auto=webp&s=f223fa70abb84bc18392c113e1dcd20d3b259929

and here is the reality:

https://preview.redd.it/hnoo2uek1p1h1.png?width=3706&format=png&auto=webp&s=59b4e26a101b1821545abcaf4905f5c0d289990b

yeah, it's 26x difference, why you might ask?

Cloudflare counts hits at the edge, no JavaScript required. If something touches the CDN, it gets counted. All bots, AI scrapers. headless Chrome, link-preview fetchers, security scanners, and uptime monitors, all of them are counted.

The result?

merely 2-3% of what's reported in Cloudflare are "real visitors", how can you make any product decision based on that, you can't. what's the solution?

Use a PRODUCT analytics tool, obvious choice is GA4, it's great to have it, since you can then use it for retargeting in google ads, but to actually use it - it's robust and complicated.

There are 2 categories: self-host and paid.

Self-host: When to choose self-host? When you already self-host your app, serve the analytics directly on your VPS, good solutions are Plausible, Umami, Matomo. If you don't self-host, the benefit is questionable, it's still going to cost you money and time to set it up, it's not "free" solution in itself.

Paid: All above offer a paid plan, a good option also would be Flowsery with a freemium plan, or Fathom analytics, no self-host hassle, however keep in mind the usage, all tools increase in price the more events you get.

Honorable mention: PostHog, a brilliant all in one tool, with the downside, it's very complicated, it's free for millions of events, but you need to invest a lot of time to set it all up.

The main takeaway, don't use Cloudflare for analytics, it's a wrong use-case, and it gives you a vanity metrics that you cannot rely on.