Product Hunt sent about 150 visits and no signups. So I rebuilt Openstage around projects.

On October 20 I launched Openstage on Product Hunt. The listing brought about 150 visits. None of them signed up.

What the launch showed

The listing led with a chart of my commits. The page it linked to led with something else: a list of commits from every project at once, with a merge commit on top. Someone who came for the chart found a log.

One maker asked in the comments whether it shows qualitative proof too, or just how many commits someone made. On that page it was mostly the count.

What was missing

Three kinds of people look at a builder's work: the people who use what they make, the people who follow them, and the people who might hire them. They want to know what each thing is and whether anyone uses it. A list of commit messages from every repo answers neither. The page had no projects in it, only repos mixed into one stream.

A page for each project

Projects come first now. Every repo you commit to gets its own page at openstage.dev/you/repo: the story of building it, from its first commit to the latest thing you shipped. The description, website and picture come from GitHub, and you can write your own instead.

Readers can follow one project instead of everything you do. When several people on Openstage commit to the same repo, its page lists all of them. A project with a website is marked Live.

What you log is drawn on the chart on its date: a flag for a milestone, a rocket for something shipped.

Your own page shows only the projects you choose, and only the numbers you make public: commits, and the visits to each project's website. A visitor can look at one project or a few, from the last 30 days back to the first commit. The app has a new look too, in light and dark.

Visits to the project's own website

Commits show that a project is moving. They do not show that anyone uses it. So a project can now count the visits to its own website.

You paste one script tag into your site. It counts page views and visitors per day. The project's page draws them on the same chart as its commits, day by day from the day you add it, so its history shows the work and the visits together. It sets no cookie. To count a visitor once a day, it keeps a hash of their IP address, made with a key that changes every day, and deletes it within two days. Bots are left out. Openstage's own site runs the same script, so it is counting the readers of this post.

The free plan includes it for one of your projects. Pro is $7 a month. It counts every project's website, and where visitors come from: the pages they read, the sites that sent them, ref tags and countries. When an AI assistant sends someone, it says which one. Pro's analytics also count views, new followers and clicks out on your page and each project's.

The next number to go online is MRR, a project's monthly recurring revenue from Stripe, shown beside its commits.

Where it stands

Since the launch, nobody has signed up and nobody has paid. Three builders on Openstage commit to the same repo, a team who tried it as a pilot.

The plan has a date. The target for November 30 is three builders I do not know signing up, and one payment. Two of the three should have a project page that shows a description, a website or a release. I check early, on November 21. If no stranger fills a page and none pays, I write down what I learned and start a new plan for December.

If you build in public and want a page for each of your projects that stays current from your commits, here is mine, and yours can be next.