There's also been many new launch platforms coming up, but all of them make you compete for upvotes. Ugh.
So I have been working on something different: https://saascurate.com/
It's a community-driven platform where indie hackers and SaaS founders help each other grow their products.
The idea is simple - list your product, engage with other founders, gain exposure and social proof. No upvote system.
It's hard and expensive to turn a side project into a viable business, especially for solo makers, so my longterm vision is to be able to help founders grow their products in lots of different ways, like helping with cold outreach, partnerships and other channels.
I know there are a lot of "list your product and forget" platforms, so I am trying to build something different – where the community helps each other grow.
Let me know what you think! I'd love to hear your thoughts and see if this platform can help you grow your products.
What you've actually created here is an advertising platform that helps indie hackers and startups get in front of... other bootstrappers. This is a limited audience, in size, in scope, and in available spend.
If you want to build a community, you may be better off with a Discord server and spreading through word of mouth - or something more personalized and closed like Inbox Startup if you want to monetize it. If you want to sit in the middle of the indie hacker community and collect fees on featured slots, you've got find a way to sell access to an audience that's worth $9. You're competing with product sites which are free and ad networks that give you very fine grained targeting of a wide range of audiences.
People go to sites like PH to be surprised and delighted by interesting new products. Even if the upvote system is borked, users have some faith in the wisdom of the crowd and the PH brand. Why would I, as a user, want to see a list of "everyone who had $9 to give to Filip today" over a list of "products other indie hackers thought were cool?"
Finally, a very diligent user might look at 20 products a day on a site like PH or this one. Let's say you sell out your top 20 feature slots every day. That caps you at $66K gross revenue per year... unless you raise your prices.
My longterm goal with SaaSCurate isn't to rely on the $9 featured slots as the main monetization or draw for users. Instead, I am working to build a community where founders actively support each other through their growth journey.
When someone publishes a product on the platform, other community members receive an email notification so that they can check out the product, leave endorsements and connect. I've also got a Discord server linked in the platform as a space for founders to engage directly.
The $9 featured slots are more of a stepping stone to help fund and shape the broader vision I have for SaaSCurate. I want to help founders grow their products not just by publishing, but with other features that go beyond just product visibility.
Thank you again for your detailed feedback, I truly appreciate it and I am glad to see that we're aligned in the thought process.
Featuring it costs $9 or 500 karma points (which are earned by contributing). There are also other benefits to featuring: - Get spotlighted in a newsletter sent to all community members - Featured embeddable badge - Dofollow backlink for SEO
Additionally, competition is important. Adversarial individual decision-making is required for economic calculation to take place. Cooperation is the anti-thesis of this, and it generally fails in ways Mises describes back in the 1930s. You can read more about it in his collected works on Socialism. It applies broadly.
The main issues you'll be immediately faced with once your reach a self-starting saturation, is controlling the noise floor. If its not useful, people won't use it.
Many of these problems don't have any good solutions. GPT makes it cost-effective to destructively manipulate aspects in ways you can't predict as well.
In my general opinion, you cannot develop or preserve community when you have bad actors taking advantage of community. This is most notably seen recently with the many LLM developers crawling any public sites available. Performing what amounts to DDOS attacks.
There can be no goodwill when the status quo is bot driven, and those bots are all about taking or imposing cost through interference.
Its a cursed problem series. Open platforms fail to the flood, Closed platforms fail to lack of engagement, and Semi-Open platforms eat up all your time for little return.