So, last month I launched HanziCraft. Here are the stats.

Statistics

Google Analytics data below:

Google Analytics

I’m quite happy with the stats at this point. I made the big announcement on the 11th of January on my Chinese learning blog. Then the roller coaster started. My first sales came in within a few hours. I sell premium accounts for the site. In total I’ve only sold 8 accounts. It’s not a lot, but it’s the most I’ve made for any startup or web project I’ve worked with. It is however the first project I’ve had a product to sell.

However, those sales all came from the first two weeks. The last sale occurred on January 29th. The big spike in the middle is when I posted the site to reddit. I believe these eight sales are core users. The people who truly believe in either me (via Confused Laowai) or are hardcore  learners. It will be curious to see how future sales will be.

The bounce rate of the site is incredibly low, which is something I’m very proud of. If you look at the front page of the site, I made the entry into the site extremely actionable. It has started varying towards the end of the first month, but that is to be expected as returning users might only look up only character before heading off.

Most traffic to the site comes from my blog and HanziJS (which used to have limited HanziCraft features, but now only functions as a page to document the Node.js module that HanziCraft uses).

Referral Stats

The reason why so little hits came from reddit is because, when I posted the site I linked my blog post. That’s why the referral is high from my blog. I wanted to people to read more about project before heading to the site.

Other Notable Mentions

As you can see in the referral stats, the site is already being linked by Chinese learners. I hope, as the site grows and its utility increases and the word of the mouth will continue to grow.

HanziCraft has also been included in Hanping’s latest version (an Android Chinese dictionary) as an external link to see more info on character entries.

Conclusion

I’m happy with the stats thus far. I wish the sales were more consistent though, but that will hopefully become more clear in the future. I’m busy coding more features, so hopefully that will increase even more praise and usefulness. In terms of marketing at the moment, I’m not spending any money, but I use my Chinese learning blog as the main means to promote it. It’s been an interesting ride and I’m excited for this project!