Week 10 Recap: The backlink playbook.

Where we are 🧭

Ten weeks in, Nick Launches crossed 819 live products and added 101 new newsletter subscribers this week. Around 1,853 builders have signed up now. Domain rating jumped to 63, up from 61 a week ago. Two points in one week, the fastest climb yet.

Traffic went the other way: 23K views and 6K users over the last 30 days, down from last month. The comparison window includes the late-June viral spike, so the previous period was a hard act to follow. Still, fewer people came through the door. No point dressing that up.

The directory didn't get the memo. 568 upvotes got cast this week, up from 365 last week. Eight paid launches, double last week's four. The dip is a traffic story, not an activity story.

So this week we lead with the thing that compounds either way: links.

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The backlink playbook 🐦

Nick Launches started at DR 0 in May. Last Sunday it sat at 61. Tuesday, 62. Friday, 63 — with roughly 22K backlinks from 594 linking websites, more than half of them do-follow. No agency, no link buying, no cold outreach spreadsheet.

The playbook is five moves, and none of them are clever:

1. Get listed on curated directories. Do-follow only, skip the spam lists.
2. Launch on Product Hunt and the niche launch sites the same week. Each launch feeds the others.
3. Trade features with builders in your lane. Their audience already cares about your category.
4. Turn every milestone into a page worth linking to. This recap is one of those pages.
5. Show up daily. People link to you without being asked when you're visible.

The fun part this week was the tooling. I've been writing scripts to speed up prospecting, and the best part was finding tools I did not know existed:

• Marginalia - a search engine that only indexes the small indie web. Perfect for the niche blogs Google buries.
• HN Algolia - search every Hacker News story and comment by keyword, with a free API behind it.
• Jina Search - SERP-style results from an API with a free allowance. Prospecting you can script.

The trick that ties them together: footprints. Queries like "write for us", intitle:resources, or "best [topic] blogs" surface pages that are already open to linking out. You're not convincing anyone. You're finding the people who already said yes.

And that's the quiet answer to a down traffic month. Views reset every 30 days. Links don't. Every one of those 594 domains keeps vouching for this site while I sleep, and DR compounds - every link makes the next one worth more.

We keep the "found" part in front of the list with a few free tools:

• seoworth.it.com - fast, free SEO tools, plus a SERP preview that shows how your page looks in Google before you ship it.
• promptinsights.news - a quiet, hand-checked library of AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Substance over noise.
• 260 SEO prompts - the free pack to draft the headings, FAQ schema, and comparison tables that get a page cited. Email to unlock.

If you want the full sequence in one place, it is here: How to Rank a Brand-New Product in 2026 (SEO + GEO Together).

When was the last time you shipped a page somebody would want to link to? 👇

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Product reviews of the week 🔍

Three builders worth a longer look this week, reviewed.

BetterDB

Hook: Observable memory and caching for your AI agents.

What it does: Memory and caching for AI agents that runs on your own Valkey or Redis. Semantic, multi-tier caching answers repeated LLM queries in under a millisecond, and memory recall is scoped and ranked instead of a grab bag. Unlike the black-box alternatives, you can see every decision it makes and change the configuration live, no redeploy.

Who it's for: Teams running agents in production who want to cut LLM spend and latency without handing their agent's memory to a service they can't inspect. MIT licensed, open-core, self-hostable.

Standout feature: An MCP agent that watches your cache and proposes its own tuning - threshold and TTL changes suggested autonomously, approved by a human, applied live. Your cache optimizes itself and still asks permission.

Verdict: Every agent stack is quietly rebuilding memory and caching from scratch, and most of what exists is a black box. Observable and self-hosted is the shape builders actually want. The list agreed: 35 upvotes, the most-upvoted launch of the week.

CTA: See BetterDB

Analyse

Hook: Website analytics, SEO insights, and an AI copilot in one place.

What it does: Privacy-first website analytics wired to your real Search Console data, with funnels, retention curves, and cohort analysis built in. On top of that sits an SEO engine with an AI copilot that researches and drafts blog posts from your actual traffic data and trending topics, not generic keyword lists.

Who it's for: Builders who are tired of running analytics in one tab, Search Console in another, and content research in a third. One workspace, and your data stays yours.

Standout feature: The copilot writes from your own traffic. It sees which queries already bring you impressions and drafts the content to capture them, which is the part of SEO most builders never get around to.

Verdict: Analytics tools are everywhere; analytics that closes the loop into published content is rare. 29 upvotes, the #2 launch of the week, and there's 30% off for the first 100 workspaces with code FOUNDING100 through July 31, 2026.

CTA: See Analyse with code FOUNDING100 for 30% off.

LangWatch

Hook: The harder your agents get, the more you need LangWatch.

What it does: An open-core platform to test, evaluate, and monitor LLM agents end-to-end across multi-turn, multi-step, multi-agent flows. We reviewed it last week at 5 upvotes - then the list kept upvoting it all week. That does not usually happen after launch day.

Who it's for: Teams shipping real agents who need to catch broken behavior before their users do. Apache 2.0 and self-hostable, so you can run it on your own infra.

Standout feature: Scenario, their open-source framework that simulates full agent conversations. You catch the regression in a simulated run instead of in a support ticket.

Verdict: Last week's featured launch became this week's sleeper hit: 27 upvotes now, up 22 this week, the #3 launch of the week a full week after launching. The 25% off with code Nicklaunches still runs through Sep 1, 2026.

CTA: See LangWatch with code Nicklaunches for 25% off.

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The numbers 📊

Traffic cooled off against a spike-inflated month, while the directory itself had its busiest week yet.

Products

• 🟢 819 live products on the directory
• 📥 99 created this week
• 📅 79 went live in their launch window
• 💳 8 paid launches, 48 free

People

• 👤 1,853 users total, +115 this week
• 📬 1,296 subscribers on the list, +101 new this week
• ⬆️ 568 upvotes cast, up from 365 last week

Traffic (last 30 days)

• 🌐 23K views and 6K users, down against a window that still contains the late-June spike
• 📈 3.7K engaged sessions from 5.9K active users
• 🔗 Domain rating jumped to 63, up from 61 last week - two points in one week

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Top launches of the week 🏆

Six standouts from this week's launches, by upvotes.

See the full set on the products page.

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Changelog 📝

The SEO week: the directory grew a whole mesh of new linkable surfaces.

• 🗂️ Category pages are now "Best X Tools 2026" hubs. Every category page became a ranked listing with FAQs and an internal-linking mesh tying the whole directory together.
• 🚀 Free launches reworked: upvote 3 to launch. The free plan now has a community gate with upvote tracking and badge verification - support three builders, then launch. More activity for everyone on the list.
• 🔗 Domain rating went 61 → 62 → 63 in a single week, on roughly 22K backlinks from 594 linking websites.
• 🐦 The X account crossed 2.8K followers.
• 🏅 Commune and RankInPublic joined the featured-platforms marquee.
• 🆕 Kept the free tools in front of the list: seoworth.it.com and promptinsights.news.
• 📨 Published the Week 9 recap across the blog and the email list.

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What's next 🔭

Owning one from last week before setting the new ones:

1. The leaderboard, for real this time. I said it was shipping last week and it didn't. It's still the next surface - a ranked board celebrating the top launches and builders, now that profiles exist to point at.
2. Finishing the submission rework. The upvote-3-to-launch gate shipped; the smoother submission flow around it is still in progress.
3. The GEO thread keeps compounding. Category hubs shipped this week. Next is making every product page quotable by AI by default - the directory-as-training-signal idea, applied everywhere.

We're still opening launch slots for the coming weeks. If you're building something, submit it. The draft flow holds your spot even if you're not ready to launch yet.

10 weeks down. Thanks for reading. 🙏