Week 16 Recap: A Third Fewer Submissions, More Votes, and the Two Biggest Posts I Have Ever Written
August 23, 2026
Submissions fell from 309 to 200 and upvotes still went up. Week 16 on Nick Launches, plus the two posts that broke every reach record on the account and what one line in a comment was worth.
Your weekly roundup of fresh launches shaping how we work and build.
Week 16 was smaller on paper and better in practice. 200 products submitted, down from 309, 97 went live, and 996 upvotes cast, which is 56 more than last week. The week 34 board carried 17 featured launches, down from twenty two. The directory crossed 1,442 live products, 257 new builders joined, and domain rating moved to 73. Every landing page in this issue got a hand check before making the list.
That combination is the story. Last week the board nearly doubled and the votes did not follow, so everything on it got a thinner slice. This week a third fewer products were submitted and the vote count went up. A smaller board is a more contested board, and the people who did show up spread themselves across seventeen launches instead of twenty two. Kontier took the top of the board on 23 upvotes. Buildrship took 13 without paying for a slot, which put it ahead of five of the seven launches in the section below.
The other thing worth your time is what happened off the board. Two posts on the Nick Launches X account broke every reach record it has, both of them about builders who launched here, and the gap between them came down to a single line. That is written up below, because the line is one you can copy.
Featured Launches 🚀
Seven Pro tier and up launches ran on this week's board of seventeen. Ordered as the week page has them, with each one's real board position, and every landing page checked by hand.
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Spacebrain: 14 upvotes, #2 on the board. An all in one workspace for agencies and
service businesses that would rather not run the customer journey across six tools. Forms, landing pages, funnels and
webinars bring the leads in, and a built in CRM keeps every contact, conversation and deal in one place. Agencies can
white label it and run a separate workspace per client. -
Lesson Maker Pro: 14 upvotes, #3 on the board. A lesson planner for teachers
that goes from a chat to a ready to teach lesson, with worksheets, assessments and slides included. Edit any of it by
chat ("shorten the intro", "add a Spanish version") or by hand, then drag lessons into your real class schedule and
see the week planned down to the minute. Aligns to your state's standards and exports to PDF, DOCX, PPTX or Google
Classroom. Generous free plan, Pro at $9.99 a month. -
Bid Club: 5 upvotes, #10 on the board. A pay to rank board with a fight at the top. $2
buys a seat, anyone can buy a higher one, and the top two enter a ring where anyone can pay $1 to boost or bury them.
Money is the score and the payer stays anonymous. A Ryan Lenk experiment, with 10% of sales pledged to the American
Heart Association. -
GenerateSpecs: 5 upvotes, #12 on the board. Describe your app idea, answer a few
questions from the agents, and get back a spec an AI coding agent can actually build from. Each one runs 6,000 to
12,000 lines covering system architecture, database schema, tech stack, design patterns, features, API endpoints and
security. Takes 60 to 90 minutes, and the first 100 specs are free. -
Playboard: 4 upvotes, #13 on the board. Seventeen classic board games you can play in a
browser with a friend. Start a playroom, send the link, play a round before your coffee goes cold. No apps, no
accounts, no awkward installs. -
Markdown Reader: 3 upvotes, #14 on the board. A free Chrome extension that renders
Markdown files as clean, readable documents, with Mermaid diagrams, LaTeX math, syntax highlighted code, dark mode
and PDF export. Every file is processed locally in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is tracked. -
PureMoney.lol: 3 upvotes, #17 on the board. A public leaderboard where the ranking is
the price. The first listing is $1 and each new #1 costs a dollar more than the current top bid. Bid less and you
still appear, just lower down. Built for product sites and profiles, not for group chats or affiliate links.
Launch Weekly Winners 🏆
The most upvoted free launches of the week. No paid placement here, just upvotes. Third week running that the top free launch beat most of the paid section: Buildrship's 13 put it ahead of five of the seven above.
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Buildrship: 13 upvotes, the top free launch. A curated launch board where every
product is reviewed by hand and every upvote requires a verified visit to the product first. That second rule is the
interesting one: it is a harder thing to game than a login, and it is aimed squarely at boards where bots or a big
list decide the ranking. -
Founders Directory: 11 upvotes. A curated directory of high growth companies
backed by the best known venture firms, with a readout of how each one operates and how it is funded. Useful if you
are researching a market rather than browsing one. -
PublishYourSaaS: 11 upvotes. A curated directory for indie makers, SaaS founders
and standout tech products. A dedicated listing page and a real backlink, which is more than a lot of directories
hand over. -
Internet Map: 10 upvotes. A million permanent squares for sites, companies and
creators. Claim one, publish a profile, and the scarcity does the work as the map fills up. Early visitors can still
take a free square and badge. -
Le Gantt: 9 upvotes. Turns Trello boards and Basecamp projects into a real timeline with
tasks, dependencies and milestones, kept in sync with the boards rather than copied out of them. Free Power-Up for
Trello, interactive Gantt chart for Basecamp. -
LaunchIt: 9 upvotes. A launchpad for makers and early stage startups: guaranteed homepage visibility, a dofollow backlink and a community that actually turns up. Premium launches are discounted at the moment.
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Focuslio: 9 upvotes. Tasks, notes, projects, a calendar and a Pomodoro style timer in
dedicated workspaces, plus an activity heatmap of what you actually finished. Syncs across web, desktop and Android,
and there is a free tier.
Launch Builders to Watch 👀
Builders who made this week what it was. Worth a follow.
- Matt (@LessonMakerPro (opens in a new tab)): taught middle school, now coaches teachers, could not find a planning tool good enough for the ones he mentors, so he built it. His launch is also the subject of the highest reach post this account has ever published.
- Mark (@MarkZofMarkz (opens in a new tab)): saw the idea on his feed, finished his day job, had PureMoney.lol live that evening, and said out loud that fifty copies were coming. Getting on the board first was the point.
- Ryan Lenk (@itsryanlenk (opens in a new tab)): Bid Club, a third straight week on the board, and still building things that argue with how boards work.
- Aayan (@aayanships (opens in a new tab)): Buildrship, 13 upvotes on a free listing, ahead of five of the seven featured launches.
- Fred Sarmento (@fredsarmento_me (opens in a new tab)): Markdown Reader, a genuinely free extension that does the processing in your browser instead of on someone's server.
Worth your time 🔎
ToolFame (opens in a new tab) is a hall of fame for AI, SaaS and online tools, and it is one of the better run directories in this space. Around 800 tools listed across 32 categories, roughly 20,000 pageviews a month, and a DR of 75, which is higher than ours. The categories are narrow enough to be useful, so browsing "Boilerplates" or "Freelancer tools" gets you a short list rather than a wall.
If you are working through directory submissions and want one that will still be there next year, it belongs on the list. Take a look (opens in a new tab).
What's happening on Launch 📊
This week
- 📥 200 products submitted, down from 309
- 🚀 97 went live in their launch window, 16 of them paid
- ⬆️ 996 upvotes cast, up 56 on last week across a smaller board
- 💬 34 comments left on launches
- 👤 257 new builders joined, 3,680 total
- 📬 256 new subscribers on this newsletter, 2,648 on the list
The bigger picture
- 🟢 1,442 live products on the directory, up from 1,394
- 🔗 Domain rating moved to 73
From the X feed this week:
188 directories, checked and ranked, in one list. Not a scraped list. Every row carries the parts you cannot see from the outside: DR verified in Ahrefs, not guessed. Traffic and difficulty. Free, freemium or paid, with the real price. Do-follow or no-follow.
12 months on X, in one screen. 2.5M impressions, 40.7K likes, 25.7K replies, 4.7K bookmarks. Nearly 2 replies for every 3 likes. That ratio is the whole account. It is not clever writing. It is ONE habit.
My two biggest posts were about other people 🚀
The two highest reach posts in this account's history both went out this week, and neither one was about Nick Launches.
On Wednesday, a post about Matt and Lesson Maker Pro did 77,663 impressions. The previous record was 42,036, set three days earlier on a post about our own Product Hunt launch. This beat it by 1.8x. On Friday, a post about Mark and PureMoney.lol did 20,833. Between them: 98,496 impressions. The other fifteen measured posts of the week did 54,934 combined.
Same shape both times. Someone else's founder story, told in the third person, their product named, their launch linked underneath. No pitch.
Here is the part that cost me something to learn. The Wednesday post got 3 link clicks. The Friday post got 41. Same format, same week, comparable comment reach. The only difference was the first line of the comment under it. Wednesday opened with "Try it here" and pointed at the builder's site. Friday opened with "Get on the board" and pointed at ours. That is a 29.1% click rate against a previous best of 16.9%, and it came from changing one line.
Two things you can take from that. Telling someone else's story travels roughly ten times further than talking about yourself, and the ask underneath it has to be for the thing you actually want. Both halves are cheap to test and I had been getting the second one wrong for months.
Both posts, in full:
The hardest part of launching is finding your first users. Matt skipped that part. He taught middle school, now he coaches other teachers. He could not find a good planning tool for the ones he mentors, so he built one himself. He already had the users.
Mark knew there would be 50 of these by the next day. He built his anyway. He saw the idea on his feed, finished his day job, and had it live that same evening. Then he posted it and said out loud that the copies were coming. Getting on the board FIRST was the whole point.
Introducing the Nick Launches Partner Program 🤝
You can now earn on every launch you send here.
50% commission on every launch plan your referrals buy, for the lifetime of the customer. That runs from the $19 Starter Launch up to the $199 Ultimate Launch, so a single Ultimate referral is $99 back to you, and it keeps paying every time that builder launches again. Attribution runs on a 30 day first-party cookie, which means it survives Safari's tracking prevention instead of getting cut to seven days like most affiliate links do.
Commission is paid on launch plans only. Directory submission packages are excluded, whether they are bought as an add-on or on their own.
It is a public program, so there is no application to wait on. If you write a newsletter, run a builder community, or just keep telling people where to launch, sign up here (opens in a new tab) and start with your link today.
New Features This Week ⚡
- The Partner Program is live. 50% on launch plans, for the lifetime of the customer. Details in the section above, sign up at nicklaunches.affonso.io (opens in a new tab).
- Domain rating moved to 73. It was DR 1 in May and 72 last week. Every free listing on the directory carries a permanent do follow link from that domain, and it still costs nothing.
Quick ask 🙏
Seventeen launches on the board and 996 upvotes between them. The median launch this week finished on single digits, which means five upvotes genuinely moved things. If something in this issue deserves eyes, open its page and upvote it. Ten seconds, real difference.
Thanks for being part of Nick Launches. If you want the daily behind the scenes, including the posts that work for reasons I did not predict, follow me on X: @nicklaunches (opens in a new tab).
Building something? Submit it. Listing is free and the do-follow backlink is permanent.
16 weeks down. Thanks for reading. 🙏