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Week 23 Recap: 12 Launch Tactics, Where to Launch in 2026, and a Free Idea Checker on Top

October 11, 2026

A second record in a row with 1,292 upvotes on the week 41 board, Clarno on top with 39 from the free section, a new guide to 12 launch tactics you can automate with AI, our first long YouTube video on where to launch in 2026, and a Busabase setup guide. Week 23 on Nick Launches.

Your weekly roundup of fresh launches shaping how we work and build.

This week was about the launch itself: twelve tactics you can hand to AI, ten places to launch and which one fits your product, and the tools I would swap in at each step. Plus the week 41 board, which set a record for the second week running.

The week 41 board cast 1,292 upvotes, up from 1,219 last issue, which was itself the record. The most voted launch of the week came from the free section: Clarno finished on 39, ahead of every featured launch on the board. Every landing page in this issue got a hand check before making the list.

In this issue:

  • The week 41 board: 1,292 upvotes, a second record in a row, and a free launch on top with 39
  • New guide: 12 launch tactics you can automate with AI, every prompt included
  • New video: where to launch your startup in 2026, 10 Product Hunt alternatives
  • New dev guide: Busabase, let agents write and review every change
  • Launch tools, beginner vs pro, and the 51 directories AI answers actually name
  • Seven posts in six days, and the one that got watched

Featured Launches 🚀

The Pro launches on this week's board, ordered as the week page has them, with each one's real board position, and every landing page checked by hand. Two this week, no carry-overs, and both are still in their featured window, so they will be on next week's board too.

  1. Apify logo Apify: 27 upvotes, #2 on the board. A marketplace of ready-to-run tools for AI, which Apify calls Actors: 85,000+ of them, built by a community of developers who get paid when they run (Apify says $1.6M went out last month). They get web data from Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon and LinkedIn, generate leads and track competitors, and a Website Content Crawler covers any URL without its own Actor. Proxies, browsers, anti-blocking and scheduling are built in, and every Actor can run as an MCP tool, so your agent calls it directly. Live since Wednesday, featured through October 20.
  2. WhereTheyAsk logo WhereTheyAsk: 4 upvotes, #6 on the board, live since Saturday. A free community platform with pages, friend feeds, groups, events and live rooms, built in the USA with the First Amendment first. The feed is friends, groups and pages you follow, in time order, with no ads. Groups can be open or private with a code, live rooms let the people in the room talk while everyone else watches, and the founder is your first friend when you sign in with Google. One day on the board so far, featured through October 24.

Launch Weekly Winners 🏆

The most upvoted free launches of the week. No paid placement here, just upvotes. Every one of these went live on Monday, and the top one out-voted every featured launch on the board.

  1. Clarno logo Clarno: 39 upvotes, the most on the whole board. "Every AI says yes. Clarno checks if the market will." Bring an idea, a sentence or a whole deck, and it reads the real market first: who already has the problem, and what they pay for today. Then up to 50 market agents with memory and budgets take it apart. You leave with a verdict, its evidence and three directions, and when a number cannot be found it says so instead of inventing one. 60 free credits, no card.
  2. Herb Library logo Herb Library: 31 upvotes. An herbal reference app on iOS with 27+ herb profiles, 20+ conditions and an AI herbalist called Herbert who answers questions about herbs and remedies. Built for people tired of three-hour search spirals and conflicting advice. Free email list, app on the App Store.
  3. Shhots AI logo Shhots AI: 27 upvotes. One product photo in, image ads, video ads and creator-style UGC ads out, sized for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube, with no prompts to write. There is a Real Estate Studio for listing photos, staging and property video, and an MCP server. From $19 a month.
  4. One Shot Socials logo One Shot Socials: 24 upvotes. Create once, post everywhere: one composer for captions, media and thumbnails, a content calendar, team approvals and publishing to every connected channel at once. Free to start, no card. Last week it was Autoadify and Meadow: a social scheduler in the free top five two weeks running.
  5. The Solo Market logo The Solo Market: 23 upvotes. A marketplace for self-hosted software made by solo developers: buy it once, keep it yours, no subscriptions. It is pre-launch, so sellers can list a tool for free now and buying opens at the public launch.
  6. LaunchBert logo LaunchBert: 22 upvotes. Submits your product to 102 curated launch directories with a roadmap, a Chrome autofill extension and one-click badge embeds. A launch tool doing well on a launch board, which keeps happening here.

Four more finished on 20 votes each: FindImagePrompt, which turns a reference image into a detailed AI image prompt; Water a Day, a daily hydration calculator; SpeedSound, real-time sermon captions on visitors' phones, paid only while the microphone is live; and SpokenPost, which turns a 60-second voice note into a LinkedIn carousel, post and X thread.

Launch Builders to Watch 👀

Builders who made this week what it was. Worth a follow.

12 launch tactics you can automate with AI 🤖

Most of a launch is typing. AI does the typing, you do the judging. On Wednesday this went out as a 14-slide carousel; the guide is the full version, with the exact prompt for every tactic that needs writing, the steps, how long each one takes and a real screenshot.

The twelve, in launch order:

  1. Find where your buyers hang out. The subreddits, the search queries and the words they use for the problem. That list decides what you write for every other tactic.
  2. Reply in threads that already rank. A Reddit thread on page one of Google keeps its traffic for months, and AI Overviews quote it too.
  3. Write every tagline length once. 60, 80, 160 and 260 characters, then paste them into a counter, because models miscount.
  4. Skip the directories AI never names. 51 of the 193 directories in the tracker show up in 100+ ChatGPT and Google AI answers.
  5. Stop typing the same form. Name, tagline, description, URL, logo: the Autofill extension fills them in.
  6. Post a Show HN. Hacker News is named in 41,656 ChatGPT and Google AI answers. Show HN rewards plain writing, so the prompt comes with strict rules.
  7. Make your page readable by AI. Text that renders without JavaScript, a robots.txt that mentions AI crawlers, an llms.txt map. An afternoon of plumbing.
  8. Ask AI what it recommends. Ask your buyers' questions yourself, write down who gets named and which pages the answer leans on.
  9. Turn on Bing's AI Performance. A Bing Webmaster Tools report that counts how often Copilot cites your pages. Ours shows 2K citations in three months.
  10. Publish one number nobody else has. If the only place a number exists is your page, every article that needs it has to point at you.
  11. Turn one launch into 6 posts. One story, rewritten for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads and YouTube Shorts.
  12. Launch from your coding agent. My favorite: connect the Nick Launches MCP server once, ask your agent to submit your URL, and review the draft it writes from your own code and README.

It closes with the launch week in order, as a checklist. Read the guide.

Where to launch in 2026, the video 🎬

Our first long YouTube video: Where to Launch Your Startup in 2026: 10 Product Hunt Alternatives (opens in a new tab), about eight minutes.

The answer up front: do one ranked launch, spend the rest of the week on directories that fit your niche, and tell the story once, in a community where your users already hang out. Then ten places to launch, Product Hunt, Nick Launches, Peerlist, BetaList, DevHunt, Uneed, Fazier, TinyLaunch, Launching Next and MicroLaunch, plus Show HN, Indie Hackers and Reddit. For each one: how long your launch is visible, who is in the audience, what the free tier asks in return, and which kind of product it suits.

Where to launch, by product:

  • Developer tool: DevHunt and Show HN first, then Peerlist.
  • Indie app for developers: Show HN and Peerlist, then a weekly board like Nick Launches.
  • AI product looking for early users: BetaList before launch, then Uneed and Nick Launches, plus the AI-specific directories.
  • SaaS with no ad budget: one ranked launch, the free directories that match your niche, one honest community post.

One disclosure, the same one the video makes: Nick Launches is mine. The written version, with the full comparison table, is Product Hunt alternatives.

Busabase: let agents write, review every change 🧩

Would you let an AI agent write to your data? Busabase (opens in a new tab) is an open-source workspace your agents share. Every write is a change request with a message, an author and a field-level diff, and your permissions decide whether it merges now or waits for you.

I installed it, connected Claude Code over MCP, and wrote the setup guide: seven steps, about 20 minutes, $0 because it is MIT and runs locally.

  1. Start Busabase in one command, with no account and no database to install
  2. Connect Claude Code, Codex or Cursor over MCP
  3. Build your first Base, in two API calls
  4. Decide which writes wait for you, the setting most people miss
  5. Review the diff and merge
  6. Read the history
  7. Keep it running, and install the skills

Every step was tested on a fresh install of Busabase 0.95.1. Nick Launches is not affiliated with Busabase.

Launch tools: beginner vs pro 🧰

Saturday's carousel: what I would use starting out, and what I use after reviewing 3,500+ launches.

StepBeginnerPro
Launch dayProduct HuntA full week on the Nick Launches board
DirectoriesA spreadsheetThe Launch Directories tracker
SubmittingBy handThe Autofill extension
Site checkLighthouseSite Audit and the AI Readiness Test
First usersScrolling RedditThe First Users report
The listingCopy and pasteThe MCP server, drafted by your coding agent

Tuesday's carousel was the tracker in one number. We counted the AI answers that name or cite every directory in it: 31 directories are named in 1,000+ ChatGPT and Google AI answers, 20 in 100 to 999, 95 in 1 to 99, and 46 have never been named once. 35 of the 51 that clear 100 are free to join. The AI cited column is on every row of the tracker.

Worth your time 🔎

Directory submission checklist for new product launches, a guest post from the team behind Pro Launch. Define what success means before you submit, pick directories that match your audience, prepare one listing kit, then verify every live listing and measure what it brings. It pairs well with tactics 4 and 5 above.

Where to launch your startup in 2026 got two new entries this week, Launchstag and TheSaaSDir, with their current prices and what the free tier asks for.

What's happening on Launch 📊

This week

  • 📥 210 products submitted, down from 230
  • 🚀 87 went live in their launch window, down from 108, 6 of them featured
  • ⬆️ 1,292 upvotes cast, up from 1,219 and the most in any week so far, for the second week running
  • 👤 365 new builders joined, 5,708 in the directory
  • 📬 348 new subscribers on this newsletter, 3,864 on the list

The bigger picture

  • 🟢 2,191 live products on the directory, up from 2,183
  • 🔗 Domain rating holding at 76
  • 📣 80.7K impressions on @nicklaunches (opens in a new tab) across 63 posts, down 50.5% on the week before (Typefully, October 4 to 10). More posts went to the new channels this week, and X felt it.

Seven posts in six days 📣

Three carousels, three short reels and our first long YouTube video went out between Monday and Saturday:

Most posts end with a keyword. Comment it and you get the full guide behind the post. Follow along wherever you actually scroll: X (opens in a new tab), TikTok (opens in a new tab), YouTube (opens in a new tab), Instagram (opens in a new tab), LinkedIn (opens in a new tab) and Facebook (opens in a new tab).

Quick ask 🙏

1,292 upvotes, a second record in a row, and a free launch at 39 that out-voted every featured one. The free section keeps getting deeper: ten free launches finished on 20 or more.

If something in this issue deserves eyes, open its page and upvote it. Ten seconds, real difference. WhereTheyAsk went live on Saturday and Apify on Wednesday, and both are still in their featured window this week.

If you have a launch here, run a site audit. It is free and it takes under a minute.

Thanks for being part of Nick Launches. If you want the daily behind the scenes, including which launches climb and why, follow me on X: @nicklaunches (opens in a new tab).

Building something? Submit it. Listing is free and the backlink is permanent.

23 weeks down. Thanks for reading. 🙏

Category: Product Updates
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