Has anyone actually made money from a Product Hunt launch without an existing audience?

I want to separate the mythology from the data here, because I keep hearing two contradictory things.

Version A: PH launches are a vanity metric now the upvotes don't convert, the badge is a participation trophy, and the real value is the backlink.

Version B: people still get their first 100 paying customers from a single good launch.

My situation: no audience, no list, product is B2B and costs $29/month. A launch would be my first real distribution moment. I'm trying to decide whether to spend six weeks building an audience first, or launch now and use PH as the audience-building event itself.

So I'm asking for specifics, not general advice: if you launched with no audience and got paying customers from it, roughly how many, and what did those customers actually do after signing up? And if you launched with no audience and got nothing, what do you think the missing piece was?

I'd rather hear five concrete stories than fifty "it depends."