A board for things people actually built

Most launch platforms optimise for one loud day. A product goes up, a few hundred people vote, and then it is buried under whatever launched the next morning. That is a fine game if you have a launch team. It is a terrible one if you are a person who shipped something on a Sunday.

Buildmates is built the other way around. Products stay findable. Ranking decays slowly. The newsletter goes to people who asked to hear about small software, and it goes out whether or not anyone paid.

How it works

Anyone can publish a product for free, and it goes live the moment it is submitted. There is no review queue and nothing to wait for. Once it is live it sits in the directory, the launch feed and the category it belongs to, permanently. Anything that turns out to be spam gets removed afterwards — we would rather clean up occasionally than make everyone wait.

One submission puts a product in six places: Google, through the listing's own indexed page; the directory, where people search and filter; Friday's email; the Buildmates social account; the related products on every page in the same category; and that category's own page. List once, get discovered everywhere. Worth saying plainly: the search visibility is the board's, earned by its own pages — we do no SEO work on your domain, and nobody sensible should promise you traffic they do not control.

Ranking is upvotes, notes and views, decayed by age. Featured placement is bought, and it never touches the ranking — a featured product that nobody clicks still falls down the trending board.

How it pays for itself

Featured placement costs $150, once, per product. That buys homepage placement for a week, a badge, priority position in the launch feed and a guaranteed slot in Friday's newsletter. There are ten slots a week, first come first served. Beyond that there is a newsletter sponsor slot, a partner slot per category, three site-wide board partners and a launch post. Every one of them is a single payment — nothing on this site is a subscription, and nothing renews on its own. There is no advertising network, no sponsored section mixed into the rankings, and no data sold to anyone.

What we will not do

• Sell the ranking. Featured placement is a position on the page, not a position in the list.
• Email you more than once a week.
• Add a feed algorithm that decides what you want to see.
• Delete a listing because the product stopped being new.
• Put a submission in a queue and make you wait for a human to approve it.

Get in touch

Write to info@theshortcutagency.de. If you built something, put it on the board — it takes about two minutes.