I’m an indie maker, just like many of you. A few months back, I launched a product on one of the big platforms, and... nothing. It got buried under dozens of other launches within hours. All that work, all that excitement is gone in the blink of an eye. No one even saw it.

It stung. I wasn’t mad, well, maybe a little but mostly, I just felt invisible. The truth is, indie makers like me don’t have big teams or budgets to fight for visibility. We rely on genuine support and connections. I couldn’t stop thinking about how many great ideas never get the attention they deserve because they’re overshadowed.

So, I decided to build something different: https://itslaunched.com

Here’s the idea:

• 10 launches per day, max. Limiting the number of daily launches ensures that every product gets its moment in the spotlight.

• 2 votes per user, per day. This isn’t a popularity contest. You only get two votes, so people have to really think about which products they want to support. It’s quality over quantity.

• “Under Radar” feature. This one’s my favorite. If a product doesn’t get much love on its launch day, it gets a second chance to shine the next day. Because timing shouldn’t be the only thing standing between you and success.

There’s more like badges, comments, streaks but the heart of it is simple: a fair shot for indie makers.

I built this because I believe every product deserves to be seen, especially the ones built by solo makers and small teams putting their heart into something they truly care about. And I didn’t build this to compete with Product Hunt. I built it to give indie makers the platform they deserve, one where their creativity truly gets noticed.

If this sounds like something you’d want to check out, I’d love your thoughts. I’m still tweaking and improving it every day based on feedback.

Let me know what you think and if you’ve got a product you’re proud of, I’d love to see it shine.

If you care fairness, I have 1 extra suggestion that you might be interested in.

It was proven by several data-science research that when users have to votes (or give ratings) and if they are able to see the previous result, then the first few votes have an extremely important effect.

For instance here is one stury, very well written article by a famous teacher Robert West, "of sheep and beer" https://dlab.epfl.ch/2017-08-30-of-sheep-and-beer/ which describes this effect on beer-rating sites.

One way to overcome this effect is to hide the votes until enough votes were collected (eg more than 50). Another way is to hide votes until you have voted yourself.

Another related aspect: it’s likely that tech hype sphere will not actually make much of a difference unless you’re selling to those people directly. My app Payload got featured in fastcompany, and I thought that was amazing. It drove traffic to the website and I was just waiting for the users… that didn’t come. And then a few days later back to normal.

On the other hand, the less prestigious tech blogs for regular people (think PC magazines) were much better at driving both real users and also traffic.

Anyway, the point is that your customers might not be on product hunt checking out the coolest newest hypiest products. In fact, it’s very unlikely they are. Just a reminder to not take these games so seriously.

I really wish Ryan Hoover would take back the integrity of Product Hunt. It's such an amazing product with such currently painful execution, assumingly in the name of site traffic traded for ad dollars.

I truly think that the conversion rate for advertisers on PH would go UP if the quality of the site (moderated posts, comments, bot traffic) did the same.

Looking cool! I have two questions though:

>10 launches per day, max.

What if your launch queue will be filling at a much faster rate aka backpressure issue? E.g what if this went viral and you get 1000 new projects per day, any new launch is scheduled after three months then?

>2 votes per user, per day.

Any idea how to prevent someone from creating 10 fake accounts and making it 20 votes per day? I'm sure any entrepreneur will see this opportunity right away if a little cheating means more exposure.

Looks like a good alternative to product hunt, the UI is looking fresh and I like it, however I'm genuinely interested about your thoughts on the problems this model can have at scale.

This is awesome! Congrats on the metalaunch ;-) I found the site hard to navigate visually as everything was equally prominent (in fact, yesterday's launches pop more than the current ones right now), so I took a stab at a different layout.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4qoY7o2.png

Code here: https://gist.github.com/airstrike/923a7049d5cde7405e60e99e22...

I see a new product-hunt alternative launched every couple months here. Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t think we’re going to displace product hunt with things like new voting dynamics. They already have the network effects, so I think you’d need to make a relatively large change to stand a real chance.

Edit: Here’s a proposal for a bigger change. do some free advertising for the submitted ideas. Run simple Google/youtube/facebook ads for them, just directing people to their page on your platform. Hopefully this doesn’t burn too much cash, since you’re actually advertising for their page on your platform, so it’s good for you in the end. Perhaps submissions have a small fee in the long-term, to monetize the platform.

Nice product overall. Not sure anybody pointed out this yet, but you should consider changing spaces for dashes on your slugs, they look better than the coded space (%20) on pages like: https://itslaunched.com/profile/Kazane%20Shimizu

How would you handle the situation that if this is successful, you’ll get massively more than 10 candidates each day?

Nice work! It looks pretty good, I just might use it soon!

FYI, you seem to have an encoding issue. There is a bunch of `'` in your pages. [0]

[0]: https://itslaunched.com/product/sponsorapp

I really like the direction you’re taking. Product Hunt can feel like it’s run more for the benefit of the maintainers than for the community. It’s their service, so fair enough, but it also means users sometimes lose out. And let’s face it—there’s definitely some gaming of the system going on.

Your approach seems promising. Have you considered taking it even further, maybe by making the platform more decentralized or democratized, kind of like a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)? That might align the incentives more directly with the indie maker community and help keep everything transparent. In any case, I’m glad to see new ideas that give smaller products and teams a fair shot.

Keep at it!

D

It's all a fine balancing act, sure, but ...

"This isn't a popularity contest... so anyway, here's how voting works" is a bit silly, and right there on the front page is "yesterday's winners" which is more than a bit disingenuous.

What if I vote for nothing because all of the products are bad? Why do I care about a user leaderboard for with streaks and their voting history? No noise?

People are so concerned with having an actual downvote button but not-so-concerned with how gameable upvote only systems are.

One of my favorite newsletters just gives links with one-line description. Done. What if this site just listed 10 products a day. No voting, no "judgment" by anyone except the person curating the links.

What if 100 products come out in a week. How do you choose?

etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

Just another channel to saturate

Hi Good job on launching! I like it quite a bit!

I’ve just won yesterday with https://partey.io and tried to contact you via mail (hello@) because I have several issues. Mostly I cannot answer any comments (or delete mine). This is especially awkward because I could post one asking for questions, I got some and now I cannot answer them… this was the case since yesterday and it’s very frustrating.

Also I am also technically the most voted product, yet I am in third place for all which kind of makes me feel cheated. I guess the comments count there as well (which is additionally frustrating)…?

Other notes:

* login sessions are extremely short

* links and upvote buttons need to be bigger(!). People are posting here to get people to visit the site and it is not prominent at all in the detail page

* the upvote button as a logged-out user leads to errors

* you have no contact info

What is with this idea of having engaged user metric for such sites? Why are engaged members rewarded and recognized when the products should be the one that should get the focus and attention.

Can someone please tell me what I fail to understand? I fail to see why such apps focus on the creator than the creation itself?

This is nice! It looks like the pipeline is filling up! I signed up to launch NimbleAI [1] on your site.

One small issue with the launch date calendar. When I clicked a date in the calendar the popup with the actual launch date was always one day later. I wanted to launch on Tuesday, Jan 28, but when I picked that date it scheduled the launch for Wed, Jan 29.

BTW... what was the product you launched on PH that got buried??

Also... how funny would it be to launch ItsLaunched on PH and have it bubble to the top of PH! You should coordinate a launch on PH with all the users signed up for your new tool to get lots of votes. THAT would be awesome!

[1] https://www.nimbleai.co

I think the only product that you could really launch on Product Hunt is a Product Hunt clone.

Hey! I am launching my product on your site! Overall I think its really well made, 2 small things:

1) In categories it says (1) even for things that don't have a single launch listed when clicked maybe cuz there is an upcoming launch for the category, but none yet? IDK why, but just to let you know 2) Confirming the launch date (alert) said it was for one day before the one I selected, then on the confirmation page though it had the correct date.

I hope your site takes off! GL! ;)

It is good to create direct, fair and healthy competition for the Product Hunt (I am all for diversity). Competition is always good for business.

As far as successful launching on Product Hunt and getting feature isn't just for everyone. You have to do marketing, building hype around your product, moderate product idea (it's a minimum to get featured), good copywriting and whatnot.

I'm also going to sign up because of its features.

Nice, congratz on the launch!

Submitted my product for tomorrow, excited to see how it goes!

Some feedback: - Could probably benefit from adding white-space: pre-line; in a couple of places, e.g. comments to support line breaks - The encoding issue mentioned elsewhere too, stuff showing up as like ' - Launched today should maybe be a bit more prominent, but maybe it also looks better once there are more products that just one.

I like that you show the website stats. For an indie maker, we care about reach a lot. The transparency is important I think.

I like the name of it except for the missed opportunity to use the active voice instead of the passive. “It launched” is just as grammatically correct as “It has launched” in spite of how the passive voice gives an air of “regality” or whatever, it’s more laborious out of the mouth.

“It launched” is concise, direct, to the point and active.

Love it! I think you’ve got something here.

The one thing to solve for imo is the initial attraction needs to be incentivized for being the early set in of users/contributors to arrive. On that note, make it possible for me as a product recommender to recommend someone else’s product if I want to, and that can be a separate bucket for recommendations.

Then what you have now is essentially digg and Reddit but for startups. It submission will be slow on day one, but hopefully ppl stick around if you capture their imagination and plant a seed for them to come back for.

A second tab by other recommendations by the user will always be buzzing as people will naturally want to hack their chances into being promoted to the LIST on the first tab and/or by being promoted, or feeling good about it, or helping a friend etc and the recommending submitter gets points that can be used for launching their own product and with greater placement or give them one vote for every 10 votes their reco gets on the other tab.

Anyway, I’m riffing but I’m also taking a break from working on a stratplan for my startup and winding down on the couch.

Love the simplicity. PH sold out.

P.s. instead of votes, give people satoshis’ and use as an opp to on-ramp more people onto crypto.

I think this is a great product! I would like to post my product when it is ready.

You said that you do not monetize now, but I am curious how much the infrastructure costs are.

I am curious why 10 launches by day ? Is a launch registering a product for sale ? If yes, why not restrict to 1 launch a day, or 1 launch a week. It's not like anyone is that productive that they create 10 products in a day.

Awesome, congratulations!

A few notes:

- Sign up with Twitter? Please consider sign up with Apple, Github and maybe Google. - You should def hide votes until someone has voted or used all their votes for the day to reduce bias.

Great ! PH has become "too big" and full of spam, it needs alternative :)

Bug report : When you post a comment, if you refresh the page it's sending it again and you have duplicates

Surely this trades being in the spotlight for a few minutes now for being in the spotlight in a year's time when it's your turn in the 10-products-per-day queue?

I don't like that I have to comment before I can post my own product. None of the items on the page look like something I'd want to try or comment on.

Feature request: Just a way to bookmark or save products so I can go back and reference them at a later date.

Launch platforms are terrible businesses.

In fact they're terrible products, too, even if you don't aspire to run one as a business.

People don't realize this, so they keep building more launch platforms to replace the previous launch platforms, thinking that a different design will "work." But it won't work. Because the idea is flawed from the get-go.

Launch platforms are inherently competitive. There is no way for "everyone" to get to number one. As you scale and get more and more people adding their products to your platform, your homepage and your visitors' browsers' viewports stay the same size. So the ratio of launches:visible_launches grows and grows, and therefore the percentage that get any attention shrinks over time.

You can try to remedy this by making it less competitive to launch, e.g. by cycling through submissions so no one is at the top all the time, or giving products second-chance days, or adding more launch lists so there's more real estate of products to upvote, or whatever. But this just leads to a second and more impactful problem…

…which is that you won't get any traffic. A launch platform is a marketplace, and the only value the supply side has for posting to a launch platform is to get users and/or feedback. Those users and feedback come from traffic, i.e. the demand side of your marketplace. And traffic comes from people referring their friends/audiences to the launch platform to upvote their product. In other words, it's the competition that drives traffic. That's it. Nothing else brings traffic. People en masse don't tend to make a habit of frequenting launch platforms, nor do launch platforms show up for popular search keywords, nor do they get shared on social media (except when first launched), nor do they receive traffic in any other way other than people promoting their launches.

So when you kill competition, you kill the only source of traffic you're ever going to have, and your launch platform ceases to be valuable. You killed the demand side of your marketplace, which made it useless to the supply side.

Limiting your platform to 10 launches per day seems like a clever way to circumvent this, but even if that "succeeds", the result will be that you have many more than 10 people per day who want to launch. And you will either have to expand to accommodate them (and thus encounter all of the above problems), or you'll have to implement some sort of rules or system for who gets to launch and who doesn't. Which is just you picking the winners/losers, and doesn't avoid the entire problem you sought to solve, which is preventing people from losing. All the people who don't get to launch will be on HN in a month writing about how they're making a new launch platform that works for everyone.

So what's the solution?

It's to understand and accept that marketing is competitive. And launching is just marketing. So launching is competitive.

Attention is zero sum. Not everyone can win. The vast majority of all products built will die in obscurity, and it's not because of a flaw in the design of launch platforms, social networks, search engines, etc. It's an inescapable fact of reality. It might as well be a law of physics. It's better to just embrace it.

Love the idea! Would be amazing if the ranking algorithm would be public. As in you know exactly what needs to be done to rank higher

Looks nice, but you need to add more categories, also what's you plan to prevent bots? PH is full of bots.

What if you're an author and the products you launch are short stories. Can I participate?

Its throwing 500 error when I try to visit any product page

Great idea and execution. Agree with all the points you've made about Product Hunt.

Looks great! Hope to see more submissions to HN from this site! Congrats on the launch!

Site looks fresh. At now there are free slots to publish projects, so I added my as well.

Good look!

Thanks for sharing and congrats on the launch!

I'm not seeing what makes this more fair or product hunt unfair. Can you talk about that piece?

If I'm reading between the lines, it kind of seems like you think product hunt is unfair because savvy startups activate their users for votes. Wouldn't the same thing happen here?

I honestly wonder about that kind of place. To me, consumers don't go on these platforms, only other makers. So it seems like it's just a place where you can get your idea stolen.

Edit: or best case scenario, bought

Promoting your own products doesn't really make it far though does it?

I submit my site into this directory too, love it.

Gotta admit, I kinda love this. Thanks man.

Love it. Are you thinking about monetizing it?

Congrats! I love the idea!

Looks cool.

Well done!

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