I've watched dozens of indie devs pour two weeks into a Product Hunt launch, hit #3 of the day, get a 24-hour traffic spike... and then watch analytics flatline by Thursday.

The launch wasn't a failure. The strategy was: they optimized for one day instead of the 365 that follow.

Here's the part nobody talks about at launch:

The durable value of a launch isn't the traffic spike — it's the backlink and the indexable page that keep working while you sleep.

The 24-hour problem, in one chart