Nick Launches - Don't just build, get discovered

Three builders posted on r/ProductHunters this week about what came after they launched. One team had about 70 bots in their DMs selling upvotes before they had even posted the launch. Another got 24 cold emails, 4 fake demo requests and an offer of 100 upvotes for $50. A solo developer with 7 months of work got 0 votes and 0 comments. Votes you can buy tell you nothing. So on Nick Launches, a free launch starts with you judging other builders: three head-to-head rounds, six launches compared. Then a person reviews yours, and it gets a week on the board. Comment FREE and I'll send you the link. #buildinpublic #indiehackers #startups #producthunt

On October 17 a solo developer posted a demo of a new feature. 27 hours later, a competitor posted a near-identical demo. Same on-screen line: "Every cut recalculated." Their public source code had a dev note crediting "a CalcuFloor film". 313 builders answered him on Reddit. The top reply: "welcome to the era of AI copy cats." In another thread the same week, a developer who has shipped since before AI put it in one line: "The main puzzle is selling now." If a feature can be copied in 27 hours, the feature is not the moat. Being the product people already found is. What that means the week you ship: 1. Publish before you polish. A dated demo, a changelog post, a launch listing: public timestamps with your name on them. 2. Name the buyer in your first line. A copy can take the feature. It cannot take a buyer who already knows you. 3. Launch in several places the same week, not one. One launch day is one day of attention. A weekly board keeps you on the page for seven. 4. Answer every comment in the first 48 hours. The clone ships the demo, not the conversation. 5. Keep showing your work anyway. One reply in that thread: "the copies grab whatever was in the demo and miss all the reasoning behind it, so they're always one step behind the next thing you ship." 99 products are launching on Nick Launches this week. A free launch works like this: pick your week, judge three head-to-head rounds of other launches, add the badge, and a person reviews it before it goes live. Link in the first comment. #buildinpublic #indiehackers #startups #saas

Your first Meta ad is a guess. Someone in your niche has already paid to find out which guesses work, and Meta publishes the answer for free. The Meta Ad Library shows every active ad on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads, with the date it started running. No login needed. The signal that matters is age. Nobody keeps paying for a losing ad for 30 days. On October 19 we took apart one busy niche, AI headshot apps: about 200 active ads in the US. Of the first 66 cards, 26 had run for 30 days or more. The oldest had run for 193 days, and its hook is the buyer's job title: "For Mortgage Brokers who want to look professional and unique." What the long runners had in common: 1. The hook is about the viewer, not the product 2. One sentence of how, with a number in it: one selfie, 10 headshots 3. The objections are answered inside the ad: a one-time price, a refund 4. The product is shown working: the result, never a logo The 30-minute teardown before your first $10: 1. Search the words your buyer would type, sorted by impressions 2. Keep only the ads that have run for 30+ days 3. Ask four questions of each: hook, framework, call to action, how the product is shown 4. Write 3 ads on the same frame with 3 different hooks 5. Run them at $10 a day for 7 days, then replace the weakest hook Copy the frame, never the words. An ad that reads like a competitor's makes people think of the competitor. The method comes from Steven Cravotta, who teaches it to subscription app builders. The full guide, with the screenshots and two prompts (one turns 10 ad screenshots into a pattern table, one drafts your 3 ads), is in the first comment. #facebookads #startups #indiehackers #buildinpublic

Before ChatGPT can quote your page, it has to read it. Most AEO advice jumps straight to "get cited". It skips the boring part: can an assistant even fetch and parse the page? These are the 14 checks in our AI Readiness Test, grouped by where they fail: 1. Can it find you: llms.txt at the root, content in the HTML (most assistants don't run your JavaScript) 2. Are bots let in: GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot named in robots.txt, nothing important blocked 3. Is the answer easy to lift: the answer in the first paragraph, a real heading outline 4. Is it machine-readable: FAQ or Product schema, a .md twin or Accept: text/markdown 5. Can it trust you: Organization schema, authors and dates on articles 6. Can an agent act: an API catalog and an MCP server None of these guarantee a citation. They decide whether your page is in the running at all. The test is free and needs no account: one URL in, a score and the failing checks out. Link in the first comment. Which of the 14 does your homepage fail? #AEO #GEO #AISearch #SEO #BuildInPublic

Launched to silence. It's one of the most common posts in builder communities right now, and most of the time it isn't the product. Nobody, Google included, has a way to find it yet. Google's SEO starter guide says the vast majority of new pages it finds every day come through links from pages it has already crawled. A brand-new site has none of those. A directory listing is a first one you can get without an audience. It gives Google a link to follow, gives your product a page when someone searches its name, and puts it somewhere posting your product is the point. It won't rank you for competitive keywords on its own, so pick directories that fit your category over a 500-site blast. The catch is the forms. Every launch directory asks for some version of the same 10 things, so write them once: 1. Product name, spelled the same everywhere 2. The live website URL 3. A tagline in two lengths, around 60 and 140 characters 4. A description in two lengths, around 300 and 1,000 characters 5. One category and 3 to 5 tags 6. A square logo 7. 3 to 5 real screenshots 8. Pricing model and starting price 9. A founder name and an inbox you check 10. Social links Then keep one list. Our Launch Directories tracker lists 193 directories (87 free, 87 freemium, 19 paid) with Done and Skip ticks, and the free NL Launch Companion extension fills the forms it can reach. If you'd rather hand over the kit, our team submits to 30 to 100+ directories by hand and sends a report with every link and status. The checklist and the tracker are in the first comment. #buildinpublic #startups #indiehackers #saas

What did indie builders launch in 2026? Every launch on Nick Launches from week 1 (4 May) to 11 October, counted day by day and raced by category. Six minutes, no voice: the chart is drawn in code and the music was written for it. What the race shows: AI leads on day one. Productivity takes the lead on 7 May and holds it until 3 June. AI leads from there to the end. The moves are in the middle of the table: Marketing passes Developer Tools, SEO and Education trade places in the last weeks. Final standings on 11 October: AI 870, Productivity 824, Marketing 400, Developer Tools 344, Other 337, Communication 238, Content Creation 219, Analytics 202, E-Commerce 167, Education 135, SEO 135, Design Tools 118. How to read it: a launch carries up to three categories and counts once in each, so the bars add up to more than the 1,851 launches in the window. Source: the public nicklaunches.com API, read on 12 October 2026. I run Nick Launches, a weekly launch directory for indie builders. Comment RACE and I'll send you the week board with every launch since week 1. #buildinpublic #indiehackers #startups #datavisualization

This week's top free launch on Nick Launches got 39 upvotes without paying a cent. It's Clarno. Most AI tools will tell you your startup idea is great. Clarno reads the real market first: who already has the problem, and what they pay for today. When a number can't be found, it says so instead of inventing one. It wasn't alone. Ten free launches on the week 41 board finished on 20 upvotes or more, and the board cast 1,292 upvotes, a record for the second week running. The Week 23 recap has every one of them, plus 12 launch tactics you can hand to AI and where to launch in 2026. Comment RECAP and I'll send it to you.

Launch tools: beginner vs pro. A first launch runs on whatever is nearest: Product Hunt for the day, a spreadsheet of directories someone posted on Reddit, every form typed by hand, a Lighthouse score, and the listing pasted from a doc. It works, once. After reviewing 3500+ launches on the board, the stack I use looks different, and every piece of it is a page on nicklaunches.com: Launch day: a full week on the weekly board, free, every launch reviewed by a person Directories: the Launch Directories tracker, 193 tracked, with the ones ChatGPT and Google AI answers name Submitting: the Autofill extension, one profile fills every directory form Site check: Site Audit, plus the AI Readiness Test (14 checks on what ChatGPT and Claude get from your page) First users: the First Users report, paste your URL and get the subreddits and the searches The listing: the MCP server, your coding agent drafts it and you review and publish The pro stack plugs straight into your coding agent. The links are in the first comment. #buildinpublic #startups #indiehackers #ai

Would you let an AI agent write to your data? Most teams we talk to would, as long as they can see what it changed. That is the idea behind Busabase, an open-source (MIT) workspace that Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and your own agents share. Every agent write is a change request: a message, an author and a field-level diff. Your permissions decide whether it merges now or waits in your inbox, and every change stays in the record's history. We installed it, ran every step on a fresh machine and wrote the full setup tutorial: 1. Start it with one command 2. Connect your agent over MCP 3. Build your first Base 4. Decide which writes wait for you (on a local install they merge by default, this is the step people miss) 5. Review the diff and merge 6. Read the history 7. Keep it running The guide: https://lnkd.in/g7FmD6CK Nick Launches is not affiliated with Busabase. #aiagents #opensource #devtools

12 launch tactics you can automate with AI. Most of a launch is typing: the same five fields into 193 forms, the same story rewritten for six platforms, the same question asked to three AI engines. AI is good at that part. It is bad at the part that decides whether the launch works: where to show up, and sounding like a person when you get there. So every tactic in the deck splits it the same way. AI does the typing, you do the judging. 1. Find where your buyers hang out 2. Reply in threads that already rank 3. Write every tagline length once 4. Skip the directories AI never names 5. Stop typing the same form 6. Post a Show HN 7. Make your page readable by AI 8. Ask AI what it recommends 9. Turn on Bing's AI Performance 10. Publish one number nobody else has 11. Turn one launch into 6 posts 12. Launch from your coding agent Number 12 is my favorite: connect the Nick Launches MCP server once, and your coding agent drafts the listing from the code it already has open. You review and publish. The full guide, with the exact prompt, the steps and the time for each tactic, is in the first comment. #buildinpublic #startups #indiehackers #ai