Why We Built BuiltByMe: The Problem With Existing Indie Maker Directories
Product Hunt is great if you already have an audience. We built BuiltByMe for everyone else.
Every indie maker who has ever launched a product on Product Hunt and watched it sink to position 47 by noon knows the feeling. You spent months building something real. You wrote the copy, made the assets, set the alarm for 12:01 AM. And then you watched products with bigger Twitter followings and more connections float past you to the top of the leaderboard. That experience is what BuiltByMe is a direct response to.
What is wrong with how discovery works today
Product Hunt is an excellent platform. It is also, functionally, a popularity contest that rewards existing audiences over product quality. The products that win launch days are almost never the ones that launched that day. They are the ones with the most followers ready to upvote in the first two hours. A solo founder with no existing audience, no network of other founders to trade upvotes with, and no budget for promotion is at a structural disadvantage from the moment they hit submit.
This is not a criticism of Product Hunt. It is a description of how any attention-based ranking system works at scale. When the product gets large enough, the platform optimizes for engagement, and engagement correlates with existing audience size. The indie maker who built something genuinely useful in their spare time competes on unequal terms with a funded team doing a coordinated launch.
The other directories that exist fall into one of three categories. Dead or low-traffic directories that give you a backlink no one ever sees. Generic software listings that treat your indie SaaS the same as an enterprise product. Pay-to-list platforms where you can buy your way to the top regardless of product quality.
The gap we decided to fill
We wanted to build a directory where the product is the point. Where a solo founder who built something genuinely useful has a real chance of being discovered by someone who needs it. Where the community doing the discovering is specifically the audience that cares about indie products: other makers, early adopters, founders looking for tools, and people who actively prefer supporting independent builders over big company products.
The weekly competition model came from thinking about what would make discovery feel meaningful rather than arbitrary. Products compete within a seven-day window by upvotes from the community. Every product that launches in a given week starts at the same point. The winner gets a newsletter feature and an X post to the full audience. It is not a perfect meritocracy but it is a significantly more level playing field than a single launch day on a platform where your starting position is determined by how many followers you brought.
What we have learned in the first few months
The products that get the most traction on BuiltByMe are not always the most polished. They are the ones where the maker is clearly present: a real profile, genuine product descriptions, active engagement with comments and upvotes. The community can tell the difference between a product that was submitted as a distribution task and one that a maker actually cares about.
We have removed more than 50 submissions that did not meet our quality standards. Placeholder descriptions. No real product behind the link. Maker profiles with no name, no bio, no evidence of a real person. Every removal makes the directory more valuable for the products that remain. Curation is the only thing that separates a good directory from a link dump.
We have also seen products get discovered here that would have been invisible on other platforms. Tools with no existing audience, no launch budget, and no connections that found real users through the weekly competition and the category browsing pages. That is the thing we built this for.
What comes next
BuiltByMe is a few months old. The product is functional but still early. The things we are focused on next are better discovery tools (category pages, use-case pages, better search), more ways to reward makers who build in public and engage with the community, and a review program that gives paying products a permanent SEO asset alongside their listing.
If you have not listed your product yet, the free plan gets you listed and indexed. The Launch plan at $19 gets you a DoFollow backlink, queue priority, and a shot at the weekly competition. Either way, your product belongs here if you built it yourself.
We built BuiltByMe because we were frustrated with the alternative. That is usually a good reason to build something.