I'm not sure I understand the criticism here, but let me try to address what I think you (might?) mean, and I hope it doesn't come across as shaking a finger!

You're right that the bar is higher for Launch HNs (I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39633270) - but it's not uncommon for a startup to have a working product and real customers and yet have a home page that just says "book a call".

For some early-stage startups it makes sense to focus on iterating rapidly based on feedback from a few customers, and to defer building what used to be called the "whole product" (including self-serve features, a complete website, etc.) until later. It's simply about prioritizing higher-risk things and deferring lower-risk things.

I believe this is especially true for enterprise products, since deployment, onboarding, etc. are more complex and require personal interaction (at least in the early stages).

In such cases, a Launch HN still makes sense when the startup is real, the product is real, and there are real customers. But since the product can't be tried out publicly, I tell the founders they need a good demo video, and I usually tell them to add to their text an explanation of why the product isn't publicly available yet, as well as an invitation to contact them if people want to know more or might want to be an early adopter. (You'll notice that both of those things are present in the text above!)

I suspect I am just predisposed to not wanting to watch a video of anything, because it usually has a very low bitrate of knowledge transferred per investment of my time, which is ironic given the actual bandwidth requirements of video. In this specific case it did turn out to actually help me by pointing to the actual PR that their bot made <https://github.com/datafruit-dev/terraform-demo/pull/26/file...> and/or <https://github.com/datafruit-dev/terraform-demo/pull/27/file...> so I can know for sure that I am not a good fit for this product

However, I would not have learned that they seem to offer GCP, too, from the website; I only learned that from the video. That is my complaint: how hard would it have been to include "AWS or GCP" on the page? Or, if nextjs doesn't support arbitrary text for some reason, then including those 3 letters in the textarea here would have gone a long way, too

I know this is a ton of words, and that I'm barking up the wrong tree by telling you about my sadness about the lack of specificity from a Launch HN. But you asked to understand, and I knew from prior experience that either YC, or the mods, or both, are super sensitive to having any Lanuch HN criticized so I knew this conversation was coming. I do hope that I presented my observations in a factual and [mostly] neutral albeit frustrated tone (err, except for the "come on" ... I do regret that I included that part)

But based on your response I'm guessing I'm just not in the target demographic of what a Launch HN should offer to folks who read them. I can only say that I'll try harder to keep my feedback to myself, despite almost all of them ending with "We would love to hear your thoughts!" So, I guess it's closer to someone saying "how are you?" in the morning