Week 1 Recap: What shipped on Nick Launches
May 10, 2026
First week of Nick Launches: 76 live products, 138 signups, 128 newsletter subs, the Find Users tool, and a new self-host guide for Hermes Agent.
Why I launched this 🚀
A week ago I launched Nick Launches, a directory for builders to ship products to founders and other builders.
The bet is simple: there's room for a smaller, curated launch surface where every submission gets human review and a real shot at the homepage. No firehose, no gamed rankings.
Week one is done. Here's what happened.
The numbers 📊
Real numbers, pulled straight from the database with pnpm recap:stats:prod (opens in a new tab) (a new script I wrote for these recaps so I never have to hand-count again).
Products
- 🟢 76 live products on the directory
- 📥 79 submissions this week
- 📅 70 went live in their launch window
- 💳 8 paid launches, 68 free
People
- 👤 138 signups
- 📬 128 newsletter subscribers
- ⬆️ 280 upvotes cast across launches
- 💬 17 comments on launch threads
Traffic
- 🌐 5.1K views and 1.2K total users from analytics
- 📈 +1,137% views, +481% engaged sessions vs the prior period
- 🌍 Real-time visitors from the US, China, France, and Japan
- 🔗 Domain Rating 15 on Ahrefs in week one, off the back of a handful of high-quality backlinks (and a few builders embedding the featured badge on their own sites with UTM tracking)
For a first week with no ad spend, I'll take it.
Top launches of the week 🏆
Six standouts from the launches that went live this week. Three from featured plans, three from free plans.
Featured launches
Logo | Product | ⬆️ | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Norte Wallet Intelligence | 9 | Finds the credit card perks, credits, and coverage you're not using. Average user uncovers $2,600/yr in benefits. No bank login required. The pitch is sharper than most fintech apps I've seen all year. |
 | Prompt Builder | 9 | Free prompt generator with a built-in chat workspace, a prompt library, and an optimizer. Works across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Good fit for anyone who has 25 half-finished prompts in a Notes app. |
 | AutoChangelog | 7 | Generates user-facing changelogs from your PRs, commits, and deploys automatically. Tagline of the week: "Changelogs that write themselves." It is in fact the tool I should have used to write this post. |
Free launches
Logo | Product | ⬆️ | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Pelepop X: Extreme Chaos | 14 | Arcade brick-breaker meets bullet-hell. Top-voted launch of the week, free plan, no marketing budget. Sometimes the algorithm just likes chaos. 🕹️ |
 | Pterocos | 12 | Open-source, browser-based HTML/CSS/JS editor with Monaco, live preview, SCSS, TypeScript, Babel, and an AI chat assistant. Free forever, no account. The kind of project Hermes Agent folks will appreciate. |
 | Myka Chatbot Plugin for WordPress | 12 | Turn a PDF into an embedded WordPress chatbot in minutes. No code. Targeted, useful, ships. |
See the full set on the products page.
New tool: Find Users 🛠️
I built and shipped a small internal tool this week: Find Users.
It takes a product URL or category and surfaces likely submitters from real signals: who's posting on Reddit looking for distribution, who just launched something adjacent, who's complaining about a problem you solve. Caching is baked in, results export to Markdown/JSON/CSV, and the analytics layer makes it easy to track which queries actually produced submissions.
It is the most useful thing I built this week, by a wide margin.
Try it: nicklaunches.com/tools/find-users
Changelog 📝
Smaller things that landed this week, in no particular order.
Navigation
- 🧭 New mega menu on desktop for category discovery
- 📱 Real mobile menu with auth options for signed-out visitors
- 🪞 Navbar avatar refreshes immediately after profile edits
Featured badges
- 🎠 Featured launches now scroll in a marquee on the homepage
- 🔗 Badge URLs carry UTM parameters so builders can attribute their traffic
- ✅ Admins can manually verify badges from the review panel
Launch flow
- 💾 The submit form syncs URL query params as you type, so a half-finished submission survives a refresh
- 👀 Approved products are visible to their builders before launch date
- ❓ FAQ now spells out usage limits and supported URLs
Footer + comments
- 💬 Every launch thread has a comment section now
- 🦶 Footer rebuilt with cleaner sections and proper internal linking
Dev resources
- 📚 New Dev Resources area went live
- 🐦 First guide: Self-host Hermes Agent on a Hetzner VPS
- 🗺️ Resources are now included in the sitemap
Behind the scenes
- 📨 Daily emails moved to slot-based scheduling
- 📊 Reports export to Markdown, JSON, and CSV
- 🔐 SSO removed in favor of a simpler password + magic link flow
What's next 🔭
Week two is focused on three things:
- Tighter onboarding for first-time submitters. The submit flow works, but the path from "I have a product" to "it's live on launch day" can be shorter.
- Better launch-day signal. Comments are live. Next is making the activity feed easier to follow in real time.
- More recaps like this one. Every Sunday. Subscribe to the newsletter if you want it in your inbox.
If you're building something, submit it. Even if you're not ready to launch yet, the draft flow holds your spot.
Thanks for a great first week. 🙏