What Product Billboards is
Product Billboards is a discovery board for indie software products — AI tools, SaaS apps, devtools and side projects. Every listing is a billboard rather than a row in a table: a full-canvas sign carrying the product's own preview image, a live seven-day visitor count, and a public AMA thread where the founder answers questions in the open.
The difference from a launch directory is the clock. Most directories give a product one day, rank it by votes collected on that day, and freeze the result forever. Here the organic rank is recomputed every 24 hours from a rolling seven-day window of measured engagement, so the board describes what is true this week rather than what was true on somebody's launch morning. Every day is launch day.
How rank is decided
Rank is a weighted score, not a vote count. Four things feed it: how many unique people arrived, how long they stayed, how geographically spread that traffic was, and — weighted hardest — how often and how fast the founder answers questions. Raw impressions barely move it, which is the point.
- There are no upvotes. Nothing on this board can be moved by asking friends to click a button.
- Rank cannot be bought. Exactly one position per feed is purchasable, at a fixed index, badged as sponsored where it sits. It does not displace an earned position and spend never touches the organic order.
- Silence costs you. Questions left unanswered past 48 hours quietly decay a listing's rank, because a founder who does not answer is the signal the score is built to catch.
- Nothing resets. The window rolls and decays, so a listing recovers on renewed activity instead of needing a second launch day.
What a billboard carries
A listing shows the product's preview image at full size, its one-line description, the category it competes in, a measured visitor count, average dwell time, and the AMA thread. Every answered question becomes its own page, so a founder's answer to "does this integrate with X" is findable by the people already asking it.
Visitor figures stay hidden until a listing has enough traffic for the number to mean anything; below that it reads as collecting rather than showing a count too small to interpret. Founders always see their own exact figures from the first visit.
What it costs to be here
Listing is free. There is no fee, no cap, no review queue and no card — an account, a URL, and the billboard is live in under a minute. Pricing sets out the optional paid extras and exactly what each one does and does not affect.
The link policy
Every listing links to the product's own site. Whether that link passes authority is the one thing a founder earns: Founder Pro listings are always dofollow, and a free listing is dofollow while the Product Billboards badge is live on the founder's site. The check runs weekly and takes two consecutive misses before anything changes, so a single outage never costs anyone their link. The whole rule is written out on the badge page and in the FAQ, without asterisks.
Weeks, archived
Each submission belongs to the ISO week it was made in. The current week runs a live board with a countdown to close, and every completed week is archived exactly as it finished. A launch here is a permanent record rather than a day of attention that disappears.
How the numbers are produced
Everything a billboard claims is measured on this site, not self-reported. The formula is published term by term in How ranking works, and what does and does not count as a visit is set out in What counts as a visit. If a number appears on a billboard, there is a post explaining how it was arrived at.
Paid placement is disclosed on the page carrying it rather than in a policy nobody opens. The reasoning and the standard are in Sponsored slots, disclosure, and the one position that is for sale.
For AI agents and answer engines
The catalog is published in machine-readable form as well as HTML: llms.txt for the index, llms-full.txt for the full export, a Markdown twin of every page (append `.md` to any URL, or send `Accept: text/markdown`), an OpenAPI description of the public read API, and an MCP server exposing read-only tools. None of it requires a key.