Cory announced Pegasus's launch with a tweet he calls his most popular ever.

“It's alive!! 🚀🐎 A Django-Powered SaaS template for your next big idea.”

Despite the tweet's popularity, it produced only a small, short-lived bump in site traffic.

“The launch was very modest, but real”

Right after launch, Cory ran Indie Hackers' public '30 Days of Growth' challenge, posting daily progress updates to build accountability and visibility for Pegasus.

“Spending a month trying to grow Pegasus by working in public.”

The challenge got him featured on Indie Hackers and surfaced feedback and sign-ups, but he judged the net payoff modest against the daily distraction and stress it caused.

“So how'd it go? In a word? Mixed.”

A conference talk based on his Django JavaScript guide became the top post on the Django subreddit during a live Black Friday sale, driving bonus traffic.

“it ended up being the top post on the Django subreddit for the entire month”

The content push happened to coincide with the live sale, so the extra traffic converted directly into revenue rather than just awareness.

“This happy coincidence probably earned me hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars.”

A technical Django + HTMX + Alpine.js guide unexpectedly reached the top of Hacker News and ranked highly on the Django subreddit, driving a traffic surge during his sale.

“It ended up reaching #1 on HN and now - 15 hours later - has 372 upvotes and 208 comments.”

Cory attributes part of the Hacker News hit to luck: a controversial headline and unrelated momentum from another HTMX post the same day, not a repeatable formula.

“I also likely benefited from another post about HTMX getting traction the same day”

Cory's ongoing strategy is publishing in-depth, canonical Django technical guides that rank for their target search terms over time.

“I published two Django guides this year.”

He believes these long-form guides may be his single highest-ROI marketing activity, though he says he can't prove attribution precisely.

“I suspect these guides have a higher ROI than anything else I'm doing.”

Instead of a blanket discount, Cory sold the higher unlimited-site tier at the price of the single-site tier, promoted mainly through his own website and email list.

“So for my Black Friday deal I decided to offer the unlimited version at price of single-site.”

Visitors who signed up while the sale was live converted at roughly 20 times the rate of visitors who had signed up earlier, indicating the promotion mainly worked by compressing existing prospects' buying decisions rather than by reaching new people.

“If you created an account while the sale was running you were almost 20 times more likely to purchase than if you created an account before the sale started.”