MarketNow is live in 33 countries — here's what the traffic actually looks like (no hype)

I run an MCP (Model Context Protocol) marketplace at marketnow.site. Today I pulled the Vercel analytics by country for the last period. Here's what the numbers actually say — without the marketing spin.

The raw data

33 countries with traffic in the last reporting window. Top 15:

Plus 18 more countries with 1-7 requests each (long tail: Japan, Korea, Australia, Brazil, China, Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran, Chile, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.).

What this actually means

The honest read:

1. Reach is real. 33 countries is not nothing for a project with zero marketing budget. It means the sitemap is being crawled, the MCP Registry entry is being pulled, and a handful of humans are typing the URL.




2. Volume is low. The total across all countries is ~2,500 requests in this window. For context, a moderately popular dev tool sees 50,000-500,000 requests/day. We're at "people are finding us, but very few are coming back."




3. NL dominance is suspicious. Netherlands at 564 is almost certainly inflated by Vercel's edge network (their EU PoPs are heavily in Amsterdam) and crawler traffic that gets routed through EU edges. Don't read it as "564 Dutch users."




4. US at 434 is the real number. That's where actual humans are. If I had to guess, ~200-300 of those are real organic sessions, the rest is bot/crawler.




5. South Africa is a mystery. 193 requests from ZA, consistent across both reporting windows. No idea why. If you're reading this from Cape Town or Johannesburg, please comment — I'd love to know how you found us.




6. npm installs (1,218 in 30 days = ~40/day) are mostly noise. Most of those are CI pipelines testing the package, bots crawling npm, and a few curious devs who tried it once. Not active users.

What I'm not claiming

• I'm not claiming "33 countries = 33 markets." Most of those are 1-7 requests = a single curious visitor.


• I'm not claiming product-market fit. We have zero paying users. The 6 mandates on the platform are all my own testing.


• I'm not claiming the security infrastructure (8 Sentinel layers, WAF, honeypot, threat intel) is "battle-tested." It caught one real trojan and blocked a handful of scanners. That's it.

What I am claiming

• The platform is up and stable across 11 API endpoints in 5 languages.


• Every skill in the catalog (8,764 of them) is audited by an 8-layer pipeline that includes YARA-equivalent malware family detection.


• The MCP Registry entry is live at io.github.edgarfloresguerra2011-a11y/marketnow (v1.4.1).


• The security story (the trojan incident → L1.7 + L1.8 → 0 quarantined skills) is real and verifiable at /api/security and /trust.


• 33 countries with zero marketing means the indexing is working — Google, Bing, MCP Registry, llms.txt, sitemap. The discoverability layer is functional.

What's next

I'm not going to fake traction. The plan:

1. 
   Stop posting on dev.to every day — it was generating noise, not users. One solid post per week with real numbers.


2. 
   Focus on Reddit (r/MCP, r/ClaudeAI, r/LocalLLaMA) — actual communities where MCP users hang out.


3. 
   Hacker News Show HN — when there's a more compelling story than "I built a marketplace."


4. 
   No Product Hunt — not until 50+ real users. Launching with empty reviews is worse than not launching.


5. 
   Keep building security — that's the differentiator. Every other MCP directory is a curated list. MarketNow is the only one with 8 audit layers + auto-quarantine + threat intel.

The ask

If you're a developer who uses MCP servers (Claude Desktop, Cline, Cursor, Continue, etc.), I'd love 5 minutes of your time:

1. Install: npx -y marketnow-mcp
   


2. Try searching for a skill you actually need


3. Tell me what's missing: GitHub issue #2 is the open thread

Not selling anything. The marketplace is free. I just want to know if the security-first approach actually matters to anyone besides me.

— Edison Flores, AliceLabs LLC — marketnow.site