# WikiHunt

> The encyclopedia of the launch ecosystem


## Posts

- [Acquisition entrepreneurship](https://wikihunt.co/acquisition-entrepreneurship/): Acquisition entrepreneurship is the path of becoming a business owner by buying an existing company instead of starting one from scratch. The buyer inherits customers, revenue and operations, and focuses on running and improving the business.
- [Community-led growth](https://wikihunt.co/community-led-growth/): Community-led growth is a strategy in which a company builds a community around its product or topic and relies on that community to attract, support and retain customers. Members help each other, share what they learn and often become advocates.
- [Email list building](https://wikihunt.co/email-list-building/): Email list building is the process of collecting the addresses of people who agree to hear from a business or publisher. A list is an audience that the owner can reach directly, without depending on the rules or algorithms of a social platform.
- [Newsletter growth](https://wikihunt.co/newsletter-growth/): Newsletter growth is the work of increasing the number and quality of subscribers to a regular email publication. It combines a strong editorial promise with a set of channels that bring in readers and keep them engaged.
- [Content marketing](https://wikihunt.co/content-marketing/): Content marketing is the practice of attracting and keeping an audience by publishing useful material, such as articles, guides, videos, podcasts and newsletters, instead of promoting a product directly. The content earns attention, and trust follows.
- [Topical authority](https://wikihunt.co/topical-authority/): Topical authority is the degree to which a site is seen as a trusted, comprehensive source on a subject. It is built by covering a topic in depth and breadth, with connected content that answers the questions readers and search engines expect to find.
- [Entity SEO](https://wikihunt.co/entity-seo/): Entity SEO is the practice of helping search engines and AI systems recognize a brand, person or product as a distinct, well defined thing, and connect it with the right facts. It shifts attention from matching keywords to establishing who or what a site is about.
- [Answer engine optimization](https://wikihunt.co/answer-engine-optimization/): Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the practice of shaping content and web presence so that answer engines, such as AI assistants and search features that give direct replies, understand a brand and cite it. The aim is to be named in the answer, not only listed among links.
- [Programmatic SEO](https://wikihunt.co/programmatic-seo/): Programmatic SEO is the practice of creating many search optimized pages automatically from a template and a structured data set. It aims to capture large numbers of specific, low volume queries that would be impractical to cover with pages written one by one.
- [Directory submission](https://wikihunt.co/directory-submission/): Directory submission is the practice of listing a website or product in online directories so that people and search engines can find it. For software and startups it is a standard step in a launch, and it can bring visitors, early feedback and links.
- [Backlink](https://wikihunt.co/backlink/): A backlink is a link from one website to another. Search engines treat links as a sign that other sites find a page worth referencing, which makes backlinks one of the most important factors in how pages are discovered and ranked.
- [Domain rating](https://wikihunt.co/domain-rating/): Domain rating, or DR, is a metric created by Ahrefs that estimates the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It is widely used in search optimization as a quick way to compare sites and to judge the value of potential links.
- [Solo founder](https://wikihunt.co/solo-founder/): A solo founder is a person who starts and runs a company alone, without cofounders. The role combines every early function, from building the product to selling it, and it depends on focus, discipline and the ability to get outside help when needed.
- [Micro-SaaS](https://wikihunt.co/micro-saas/): A micro-SaaS is a small software as a service business that solves a narrow problem for a specific niche, usually run by one person or a very small team. It trades the ambition of a large platform for low costs, focus and a realistic path to profit.
- [Customer lifetime value](https://wikihunt.co/customer-lifetime-value/): Customer lifetime value, often shortened to LTV or CLV, is the total gross profit a company expects to earn from a customer over the whole relationship. It tells a founder how much it is reasonable to spend to win a customer and how much retention is worth.
- [Customer acquisition cost](https://wikihunt.co/customer-acquisition-cost/): Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is the average amount a company spends to win one new customer. It includes marketing and sales expenses and is compared with the revenue the customer brings to judge whether growth is profitable.
- [Churn](https://wikihunt.co/churn/): Churn is the rate at which customers stop paying for a product over a given period. It is the main force working against growth in subscription businesses, and reducing it is often worth more than acquiring new customers.
- [Annual recurring revenue](https://wikihunt.co/annual-recurring-revenue/): Annual recurring revenue, or ARR, is the yearly value of a company's subscription income. It is the monthly figure scaled up to a year and is the standard way to describe the size of a software business, especially one that sells annual contracts.
- [Monthly recurring revenue](https://wikihunt.co/monthly-recurring-revenue/): Monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, is the predictable income a subscription business expects to receive each month. It is the most watched number in software as a service, because it shows the size of the business and the direction in which it is moving.
- [Lifetime deal](https://wikihunt.co/lifetime-deal/): A lifetime deal is an offer in which customers pay once, usually at a steep discount, for permanent access to a product instead of a recurring subscription. Founders use it to raise cash quickly and to win early users, but it creates obligations that last as long as the product does.
- [Freemium](https://wikihunt.co/freemium/): Freemium is a pricing model in which a basic version of a product is free and users pay for advanced features, higher limits or extra services. The free tier works as marketing, and the paid tier produces the revenue.
- [Value proposition](https://wikihunt.co/value-proposition/): A value proposition is a clear statement of the benefit a product delivers to a specific customer and why that customer should choose it over the alternatives. It is the promise at the center of the offer and the starting point for copy, pricing and sales.
- [Positioning](https://wikihunt.co/positioning/): Positioning is the deliberate choice of where a product sits in the customer's mind relative to the alternatives. It defines who the product is for, what it is best at and why it is different, and it shapes every message the company sends.
- [Landing page conversion](https://wikihunt.co/landing-page-conversion/): Landing page conversion is the share of visitors to a page who take its intended action, such as joining a waitlist, starting a trial or buying. It is the main measure of whether a page turns attention into results, and small gains compound across every visit.
- [Jobs to be done](https://wikihunt.co/jobs-to-be-done/): Jobs to be done is a way of understanding customers by focusing on the progress they are trying to make, rather than on who they are. People are said to hire a product to do a job in their lives, and they fire it when something else does that job better.
- [Customer discovery](https://wikihunt.co/customer-discovery/): Customer discovery is the process of talking to potential customers before and during product development to learn whether a problem is real, who has it and how they deal with it today. Its goal is to replace assumptions with evidence while changes are still cheap.
- [Founder-led sales](https://wikihunt.co/founder-led-sales/): Founder-led sales means that the founders themselves sell the product to the first customers, instead of hiring salespeople or relying on marketing alone. It is the normal way early companies learn who buys, why they buy and what objections must be answered.
- [Product-led growth](https://wikihunt.co/product-led-growth/): Product-led growth is a go to market approach in which the product itself drives acquisition, conversion and expansion. Users can try it, understand its value and often pay for it without speaking to a salesperson, so the experience of using it becomes the main marketing channel.
- [Cold start problem](https://wikihunt.co/cold-start-problem/): The cold start problem is the difficulty of getting a network based product off the ground when it has few users and therefore little value to offer. A marketplace without sellers has no buyers, and a community without members has nothing to read, so someone has to break the loop.
- [Network effects](https://wikihunt.co/network-effects/): Network effects occur when a product becomes more valuable to each user as more people use it. They are among the strongest sources of lasting advantage in technology, because they make a leading product harder to replace the larger it grows.
- [Viral coefficient](https://wikihunt.co/viral-coefficient/): The viral coefficient, often called the k-factor, is the average number of new users that each existing user brings in. A value above one means every cohort of users produces a larger cohort after it, so growth can sustain itself without paid acquisition.
- [Growth loop](https://wikihunt.co/growth-loop/): A growth loop is a repeating cycle in which the output of one step becomes the input of the next, so that growth feeds itself. Unlike a funnel, which ends when a customer converts, a loop returns something to the system that brings in more users.
- [Waitlist](https://wikihunt.co/waitlist/): A waitlist is a list of people who asked to be notified when a product opens. It lets a founder test interest, collect contact details and build an audience before launch, and it gives the launch an immediate group of ready users.
- [Launch day](https://wikihunt.co/launch-day/): Launch day is the day a product is publicly announced and made available, usually with a coordinated push across platforms, communities and email. It concentrates attention into a short window, and its results depend heavily on the preparation done in the weeks before.
- [Bootstrapping](https://wikihunt.co/bootstrapping/): Bootstrapping means starting and growing a company with personal savings and the revenue it earns, without raising money from outside investors. A bootstrapped founder keeps full ownership and control, in exchange for slower growth and tighter limits on spending.
- [Indie hacking](https://wikihunt.co/indie-hacking/): Indie hacking is the approach of building profitable online businesses independently, without venture capital or a large team. Practitioners, called indie hackers, usually work alone or in very small groups and aim for customer revenue rather than outside funding.
- [Build in public](https://wikihunt.co/build-in-public/): Build in public is the practice of sharing a project's progress openly while it is being made, including numbers, decisions, mistakes and plans. Founders do it to attract early users, gather feedback and build an audience before and after launch.
- [Minimum viable product](https://wikihunt.co/minimum-viable-product/): A minimum viable product, or MVP, is the smallest version of a product that lets a team test its main assumption with real users. It is built to learn, not to impress, and it deliberately leaves out everything that does not help answer the central question.
- [BusinessHunt](https://wikihunt.co/businesshunt/): BusinessHunt is a launch platform for SaaS products. Instead of a single listing on one site, it helps a founder launch across many surfaces, such as launch platforms, directories, video, podcasts, articles and communities. WikiHunt is a BusinessHunt project.
- [Product-market fit](https://wikihunt.co/product-market-fit/): Product-market fit is the point at which a product satisfies a real demand in a market, so that customers keep using it and paying for it without constant persuasion. Founders usually recognize it by retention, organic referrals and demand that outruns capacity, not by launch day attention.
- [Useful SaaS](https://wikihunt.co/useful-saas/): Useful SaaS is a catalog of small software products, founded by John Lowell under the tagline "Small SaaS. Useful work." It presents compact tools that solve one job well and explains who they are for.
- [The Founders Courier](https://wikihunt.co/the-founders-courier-business/): The Founders Courier is an editorial project about starting and running a business, founded by Adam J. Peters, who signs as AJ. It brings together a publication, three sister projects and a book, all aimed at people deciding whether and how to start a company.
- [Dropbox](https://wikihunt.co/dropbox/): Dropbox is a file storage and collaboration company based in San Francisco. Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi founded it in 2007, and it became a standard reference for freemium growth and for a software company that reached a public listing.
- [Lenny's Newsletter](https://wikihunt.co/lennys-newsletter-business/): Lenny's Newsletter is the media business built by Lenny Rachitsky around product and growth advice. It began as a newsletter in 2019 and has grown into a company with a podcast, a community, a conference and a bundle of tools for subscribers.
- [Acquire.com](https://wikihunt.co/acquire-com/): Acquire.com is an online marketplace where founders sell their startups and buyers look for businesses to acquire. Andrew Gazdecki started it in 2020 as MicroAcquire and renamed it Acquire.com in January 2023.
- [MicroConf](https://wikihunt.co/microconf/): MicroConf is a community and conference series for bootstrapped software founders. Rob Walling co-founded it in 2011, and it began with the tagline "The Conference for Self-Funded Startups."
- [Y Combinator](https://wikihunt.co/y-combinator/): Y Combinator is a startup accelerator founded in March 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Tappan Morris and Trevor Blackwell. It invests in early stage companies in batches and ends each batch with a Demo Day for investors.
- [SparkToro](https://wikihunt.co/sparktoro/): SparkToro is a software company that helps marketers find out where their target audience spends time and what influences them. Rand Fishkin and Casey Henry founded it, and it is based in Washington State in the United States.
- [Ahrefs](https://wikihunt.co/ahrefs/): Ahrefs is an SEO software company known for its index of the web's links. Dmitry Gerasimenko started it with his own money, and it is headquartered in Singapore with a largely remote team.
- [Lovable](https://wikihunt.co/lovable/): Lovable is a Swedish company that lets people create web applications by describing them in plain language. Founded in Stockholm in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, it grew out of an open source project and became a leading name in vibe coding.
- [Cursor](https://wikihunt.co/cursor/): Cursor is an AI coding environment developed by Anysphere, a company founded in 2022 by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, who were students at MIT when they incorporated it. It became one of the fastest growing software products of the AI era.
- [Webflow](https://wikihunt.co/webflow/): Webflow is a software company whose browser based visual editor lets designers build and host websites without writing code. Brothers Vlad and Sergie Magdalin and Bryant Chou founded it, and it launched in August 2013 after going through Y Combinator.
- [Ghost](https://wikihunt.co/ghost/): Ghost is an open source publishing platform for blogs, newsletters and paid memberships, created by John O'Nolan. It is run by the Ghost Foundation, a nonprofit, and funded by its paid hosting service.
- [Substack](https://wikihunt.co/substack/): Substack is a publishing platform where writers send newsletters and charge readers for subscriptions. It was founded in 2017 in San Francisco by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi and Hamish McKenzie, and it became the best known home of independent paid newsletters.
- [Beehiiv](https://wikihunt.co/beehiiv/): Beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform founded by Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett and Jake Hurd, all early members of the Morning Brew team. It launched in November 2021 as an alternative for publishers who wanted growth tools and a flat price instead of a cut of their revenue.
- [PostHog](https://wikihunt.co/posthog/): PostHog is an open source product analytics company that has grown into a broader platform for product teams. James Hawkins and Tim Glaser founded it on 23 January 2020 as part of Y Combinator's winter 2020 batch.
- [Linear](https://wikihunt.co/linear/): Linear is a software tool for planning and tracking product development, built for speed and a focused way of working. It was founded in 2019 by people who had worked at companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase and Uber, and it is based in San Francisco.
- [Notion](https://wikihunt.co/notion/): Notion is a workspace application that combines notes, documents, databases, wikis and project management. Notion Labs was founded in 2013 in San Francisco, and the app was first released in 2016. It grew largely through individual users and templates before large companies adopted it.
- [Vercel](https://wikihunt.co/vercel/): Vercel is a cloud platform for building and deploying web applications, and the company behind the open source framework Next.js. Guillermo Rauch founded it in 2015 as ZEIT and renamed it Vercel in April 2020.
- [Supabase](https://wikihunt.co/supabase/): Supabase is an open source backend platform built on PostgreSQL. It presents itself as an open alternative to Google's Firebase and bundles a database, authentication, file storage, serverless functions and real time features behind simple developer tools.
- [Cal.com](https://wikihunt.co/cal-com/): Cal.com is an open source scheduling platform. Founded by Peer Richelsen and Bailey Pumfleet, it began as a side project called Calendso and grew into a commercial open core company that offers scheduling to individuals, teams and developers who want to embed bookings in their own products.
- [Typefully](https://wikihunt.co/typefully/): Typefully is a writing and scheduling app for social media creators. It began as a focused editor for writing Twitter threads and later widened to other networks. It was built by the team behind the newsletter product Mailbrew, with Francesco Di Lorenzo as one of its founders.
- [Baremetrics](https://wikihunt.co/baremetrics/): Baremetrics is a subscription analytics service that started as a dashboard for Stripe data. Josh Pigford built it in 2013 and sold it in 2020. It is known for showing founders their recurring revenue and churn, and for the open sharing of its own numbers.
- [Plausible Analytics](https://wikihunt.co/plausible-analytics/): Plausible Analytics is a privacy focused, open source web analytics service presented as a lighter alternative to Google Analytics. Uku Taht started it in December 2018 and launched it in 2019 together with Marko Saric. It is self funded and supported by subscriptions.
- [DuckDuckGo](https://wikihunt.co/duckduckgo/): DuckDuckGo is a privacy focused search engine and browser company founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg. It built a lasting business by promising not to track people's searches, in a market dominated by much larger companies.
- [Stack Overflow](https://wikihunt.co/stack-overflow/): Stack Overflow is a question and answer website for programmers and the flagship of the Stack Exchange network. Created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, it became the main place where developers look for answers to technical problems.
- [Buffer](https://wikihunt.co/buffer/): Buffer is a social media management app that lets users schedule posts and track results. Founded by Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich, it became well known for being a remote company and for publishing its salaries.
- [Starter Story](https://wikihunt.co/starter-story/): Starter Story is a media publication that shares interviews with founders about how they started and grew their businesses. Created by Pat Walls, it became a widely used source of case studies for aspiring entrepreneurs, and HubSpot acquired it in 2026.
- [Kit](https://wikihunt.co/kit/): Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is an email marketing platform built for independent creators such as writers, podcasters and course makers. It was founded by Nathan Barry and renamed Kit in 2024.
- [Gumroad](https://wikihunt.co/gumroad/): Gumroad is an online platform where creators sell digital and physical products directly to their audience. Founded in 2011 by Sahil Lavingia and Sachin Khanna, it became a popular choice for independent creators who want a simple way to take payments.
- [HubSpot](https://wikihunt.co/hubspot/): HubSpot is a customer relationship management and marketing software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, it is closely associated with inbound marketing, the idea of attracting customers with useful content instead of interrupting them.
- [Mailchimp](https://wikihunt.co/mailchimp/): Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation company based in Atlanta, Georgia. Started in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Mark Armstrong with no outside investors, it became one of the best known bootstrapped companies before Intuit acquired it in 2021.
- [Zapier](https://wikihunt.co/zapier/): Zapier is an American software company that automates work between web applications. Founded in 2011 by Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, it lets people connect thousands of apps through simple workflows, and it has been fully remote since the start.
- [Shopify](https://wikihunt.co/shopify/): Shopify is a Canadian commerce company that provides a platform for building and running online stores, along with payments, point of sale and financing services. Founded in Ottawa in 2006, it grew from a small snowboard shop into one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world.
- [Stripe](https://wikihunt.co/stripe/): Stripe is a financial technology company that provides software and programming interfaces for accepting online payments. Founded by the Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, it is one of the most valuable privately held technology companies and a default choice for internet businesses.
- [Ruby on Rails](https://wikihunt.co/ruby-on-rails/): Ruby on Rails, often called Rails, is an open source web application framework written in Ruby. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson and released in 2004, it popularized the idea of building web applications quickly by following sensible conventions.
- [Basecamp](https://wikihunt.co/basecamp/): Basecamp is a web based project management tool made by 37signals, the company known by that name before 2014 and again since 2022. It combines to do lists, messaging, file sharing and scheduling, and it is closely associated with a philosophy of calm, small, profitable companies.
- [TypingMind](https://wikihunt.co/typingmind/): TypingMind is an interface for chatting with AI models that adds features such as saved prompts, organized conversations and search. It was created by Tony Dinh, an independent developer, and is an example of a small product built on top of larger AI platforms.
- [ShipFast](https://wikihunt.co/shipfast/): ShipFast is a Next.js boilerplate sold to developers who want to launch web products quickly. Created by the French indie maker Marc Lou, it packages common features such as authentication, payments, email and a landing page so that a builder can start from a working base instead of from zero.
- [Nomad List](https://wikihunt.co/nomad-list/): Nomad List is a website that helps remote workers choose where to live by comparing cities on cost of living, internet speed, weather, safety and community ratings. Started in 2014 by Pieter Levels, it is one of the best known examples of a product built and run by a single maker.
- [Indie Hackers](https://wikihunt.co/indie-hackers/): Indie Hackers is a website and community where founders share how they build profitable businesses without relying on outside investors. Created by Courtland Allen in 2016, it features founder interviews, a discussion forum and a podcast, and it gave its name to the practice of indie hacking.
- [Product Hunt](https://wikihunt.co/product-hunt/): Product Hunt is a website where people share and discover new products, listed by day and ranked by community votes. Founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and owned by AngelList since 2016, it became one of the best known launch platforms for software, apps and tools.
- [AuthorityDx](https://wikihunt.co/authoritydx/): AuthorityDx is a website scoring product that measures how much authority a site shows, and where it can improve. It turns a site check into a score and a list of findings.
- [NoTiesBuilder](https://wikihunt.co/notiesbuilder/): NoTiesBuilder is a suite of WordPress themes from WikiHunt, with a companion plugin called Folio Core. The themes are built for sites that organize content around a topic.
- [Early Launch](https://wikihunt.co/early-launch/): Early Launch is a launch platform at earlylaunch.co, aimed at people who enjoy discovering new products. It also publishes a weekly newsletter on Thursdays that features launches.
- [IndieMap](https://wikihunt.co/indiemap/): IndieMap is a directory in the form of a map of indie hackers and solo founders. Each founder appears as a pin with a profile, so visitors can see where independent builders are and what they make.
- [SaaSDB](https://wikihunt.co/saasdb/): SaaSDB is a directory of SaaS products at saasdb.net. It is not curated: listings are not editorial picks. Its blog covers SaaS for founders, finance and business, marketing and sales, and how to build and work better.
- [Cursor](https://wikihunt.co/cursor-tool/): Cursor is an AI coding environment. For a launch, it speeds up building the first version of a product by letting a developer, or a founder who codes a little, describe changes and have an agent make them.
- [ChatGPT](https://wikihunt.co/chatgpt/): ChatGPT is a chatbot from OpenAI, released on 30 November 2022. It reached 100 million monthly users about two months after launch and, according to Wikipedia, 900 million weekly users in February 2026.
- [Claude](https://wikihunt.co/claude/): Claude is a family of large language models and an assistant built by Anthropic, a research company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees. It is available in a web and mobile app and through an API.
- [Typefully](https://wikihunt.co/typefully-tool/): Typefully is a writing and scheduling tool for social media. For a launch, it is where a founder drafts, edits and schedules the posts and threads that announce the product.
- [Cal.com](https://wikihunt.co/cal-com-tool/): Cal.com is an open source scheduling tool. For a launch, it lets prospects and early users book a call without an exchange of emails.
- [Linear](https://wikihunt.co/linear-tool/): Linear is a tool for planning and tracking software work. For a launch, it keeps the list of bugs, tasks and releases in one fast, focused place.
- [Notion](https://wikihunt.co/notion-tool/): Notion is a workspace for notes, documents, databases and wikis. For a launch, it is where many small teams keep the plan, the checklist and the lists.
- [n8n](https://wikihunt.co/n8n/): n8n is a workflow automation platform founded by Jan Oberhauser in Berlin in 2019. It uses a node based visual editor and allows custom JavaScript or Python code inside a workflow.
- [Zapier](https://wikihunt.co/zapier-tool/): Zapier is an automation tool that connects web apps so that an event in one triggers actions in others. For a launch, it replaces repetitive manual steps with simple workflows.
- [Google Search Console](https://wikihunt.co/google-search-console/): Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that reports how a site appears in Google Search. It was known as Google Webmaster Tools until 20 May 2015, when it was renamed.
- [Semrush](https://wikihunt.co/semrush/): Semrush is an online visibility and competitive research suite, founded in 2008 and based in Boston. It began as a keyword research tool and expanded into content, advertising, social media and search analysis.
- [Ahrefs](https://wikihunt.co/ahrefs-tool/): Ahrefs is an SEO toolset that founders use to study links, keywords and competitors. For a launch, it answers who links to a competitor, which searches bring them traffic and how strong a site's authority is.
- [PostHog](https://wikihunt.co/posthog-tool/): PostHog is a product analytics platform. For a launch, it shows what people do after they arrive: which steps they take, where they drop off and which features they use.
- [Umami](https://wikihunt.co/umami/): Umami is an open source web analytics tool created by Mike Cao in late 2020 for his own sites. It collects no cookies and no personal data.
- [Plausible Analytics](https://wikihunt.co/plausible-analytics-tool/): Plausible is a lightweight web analytics tool that counts visits without cookies. For a launch, it answers the basic questions: how many people came, from where and to which pages.
- [Supabase](https://wikihunt.co/supabase-tool/): Supabase is a managed back end built on PostgreSQL. For a launch, it gives a small team a database, user sign in and file storage without writing a server.
- [Railway](https://wikihunt.co/railway/): Railway is a deployment platform for applications, services and databases. Jake Cooper founded it in San Francisco, and TechCrunch described it in 2022 as a dashboard for building, deploying and monitoring apps and services.
- [Netlify](https://wikihunt.co/netlify/): Netlify is a platform for building, deploying and hosting websites from a Git repository. It was founded by Mathias Biilmann and Christian Bach, launched publicly in April 2015, and is credited on Wikipedia with pioneering Jamstack, an architecture built on client side JavaScript, reusable APIs and markup.
- [Vercel](https://wikihunt.co/vercel-tool/): Vercel is a platform for deploying web applications, closely tied to the Next.js framework. For a launch, it turns a code repository into a live site, with a separate preview for each change.
- [Webflow](https://wikihunt.co/webflow-tool/): Webflow is a visual website builder that produces clean code and hosts the result. For a launch, it lets a designer or founder build a landing page without hand coding.
- [WordPress](https://wikihunt.co/wordpress/): WordPress is an open source content management system, announced on 27 May 2003, and the most widely used way to build websites. TechRadar reported in February 2021, citing W3Techs, that it powered about 40 percent of all websites.
- [Ghost](https://wikihunt.co/ghost-tool/): Ghost is an open source publishing platform for blogs, newsletters and memberships. For a launch, it is a way to run a site and a newsletter together on the founder's own domain.
- [Buttondown](https://wikihunt.co/buttondown/): Buttondown is a newsletter service run by Justin Duke, who is its chief executive. It describes itself as the best way to start and grow a newsletter, and it is known for staying lean and developer friendly.
- [Kit](https://wikihunt.co/kit-tool/): Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is an email platform for creators who build an audience and sell to it. In a launch, it handles sign up forms, welcome sequences and the first broadcast to a list.
- [Substack](https://wikihunt.co/substack-tool/): Substack is a newsletter and subscription tool where a writer can publish for free or charge readers. In a launch, it is the quickest route to a newsletter with a built in discovery network.
- [Beehiiv](https://wikihunt.co/beehiiv-tool/): Beehiiv is a newsletter platform that hosts a publication, its web archive and its growth tools. For a launch, it is a place to collect a waiting list and send updates to the first interested readers.
- [Paddle](https://wikihunt.co/paddle/): Paddle is a merchant of record for SaaS, mobile app, AI and digital product companies. Its documentation defines a merchant of record as the legal entity that sells to the end customer and takes on the related liabilities, such as sales tax, payment security compliance, refunds and chargebacks.
- [Polar](https://wikihunt.co/polar/): Polar is an open source monetization platform for developers that acts as a merchant of record. It sells digital products and subscriptions on behalf of the developer and handles sales tax and EU VAT.
- [Lemon Squeezy](https://wikihunt.co/lemon-squeezy/): Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record for digital products, mainly aimed at software and SaaS sellers. It handles global sales tax calculation, payment and the legal processing of each sale.
- [Stripe](https://wikihunt.co/stripe-tool/): Stripe is the payment service many launches use to take their first card payment. As a tool, it lets a founder create a checkout, a subscription or a payment link without building billing from scratch.
- [Exploding Ideas](https://wikihunt.co/exploding-ideas/): Exploding Ideas is a weekly newsletter about trends that are taking off and the businesses that can be built around them. Its owner is Ian Park, and its tagline is "from signal to revenue".
- [The Founders Courier](https://wikihunt.co/the-founders-courier/): The Founders Courier is a newsletter and editorial publication for people who are deciding whether to start a business and how to begin. It is signed by AJ, short for Adam J. Peters.
- [The Growth Memo](https://wikihunt.co/the-growth-memo/): The Growth Memo is a Substack newsletter by Kevin Indig about SEO, organic growth and AI driven search, aimed at senior marketing leaders. Its about page says it reaches tens of thousands of subscribers.
- [Marketing Examples](https://wikihunt.co/marketing-examples/): Marketing Examples is a newsletter by Harry Dry that explains one marketing example per email. A third party profile says it started in 2019 as a side project.
- [Saturday Solopreneur](https://wikihunt.co/saturday-solopreneur/): The Saturday Solopreneur is a weekly newsletter by Justin Welsh for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, creators and freelancers. It is published every Saturday morning.
- [Failory](https://wikihunt.co/failory/): Failory is a newsletter and content site for startup founders, run by Nicolas Cerdeira from Buenos Aires. It began as interviews with founders of failed startups, and its guiding idea is that there is more to learn from failures than from successes.
- [Morning Brew](https://wikihunt.co/morning-brew/): Morning Brew is a daily business newsletter that Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief started in 2015 while students at the University of Michigan. It was written for young professionals who wanted business news in a brief, informal form.
- [TLDR](https://wikihunt.co/tldr/): TLDR is a network of curated newsletters about technology, built around a repeatable format of the best links in a given technical field. Dan Ni is its chief executive.
- [The Pragmatic Engineer](https://wikihunt.co/the-pragmatic-engineer/): The Pragmatic Engineer is a Substack newsletter by Gergely Orosz, an engineer and manager who previously worked at Uber and Skype. It covers Big Tech and startups from the inside, with advice for engineers and engineering managers.
- [Stratechery](https://wikihunt.co/stratechery/): Stratechery is a technology analysis publication written by Ben Thompson. It covers the day's tech news and strategy, with interviews of company leaders, founders and analysts.
- [Not Boring](https://wikihunt.co/not-boring/): Not Boring is a newsletter by Packy McCormick about technology and business strategy, written with an optimistic view of technology. It began as a link curation newsletter called Per My Last Email and was renamed in 2020.
- [Lenny's Newsletter](https://wikihunt.co/lennys-newsletter/): Lenny's Newsletter is a Substack publication by Lenny Rachitsky that describes itself as a deeply researched advice column about building product, driving growth and advancing a career. Its own page claims more than one million subscribers.
- [Emeka Onu](https://wikihunt.co/emeka-onu/): Emeka Onu is the founder of BusinessHunt, a launch platform for SaaS products, which he started in 2023. He is the person behind the platform.
- [Adam J. Peters](https://wikihunt.co/adam-j-peters/): Adam J. Peters, who signs as AJ, is the founder of The Founders Courier, an editorial project for people deciding whether and how to start a business.
- [Eli Frost](https://wikihunt.co/eli-frost/): Eli Frost is a co-owner of BusinessHunt, a launch platform for SaaS products, and is responsible for its editorial content. The name appears as the owner of the platform's channels and writing.
- [Ian Park](https://wikihunt.co/ian-park/): Ian Park is the owner of Exploding Ideas, a weekly newsletter about trends that are taking off and the businesses that can be built around them. He writes it in the first person.
- [Drew Houston](https://wikihunt.co/drew-houston/): Drew Houston is an American entrepreneur, the co-founder of Dropbox, and its chief executive from the start until announcing in May 2026 that he would become executive chairman.
- [Lenny Rachitsky](https://wikihunt.co/lenny-rachitsky/): Lenny Rachitsky is an American writer and former product manager, the author of Lenny's Newsletter and host of the Lenny's Podcast.
- [Andrew Gazdecki](https://wikihunt.co/andrew-gazdecki/): Andrew Gazdecki is an American entrepreneur, the founder and chief executive of Acquire.com, formerly MicroAcquire.
- [Rob Walling](https://wikihunt.co/rob-walling/): Rob Walling is an American entrepreneur, author and investor, the co-founder of MicroConf and the founder of TinySeed, and a leading voice for bootstrapped software companies.
- [Paul Graham](https://wikihunt.co/paul-graham/): Paul Graham is a programmer, writer and investor, a co-founder of Y Combinator and the author of a long series of essays on startups and technology.
- [Rand Fishkin](https://wikihunt.co/rand-fishkin/): Rand Fishkin is an American entrepreneur and writer, the co-founder and chief executive of SparkToro. He is widely known in search marketing for his earlier work at Moz.
- [Dmitry Gerasimenko](https://wikihunt.co/dmitry-gerasimenko/): Dmitry Gerasimenko is the founder and chief executive of Ahrefs, the SEO software company. He is Ukrainian by origin and lives in Singapore.
- [Anton Osika](https://wikihunt.co/anton-osika/): Anton Osika is a Swedish entrepreneur, the co-founder and chief executive of Lovable.
- [Michael Truell](https://wikihunt.co/michael-truell/): Michael Truell is a co-founder and the chief executive of Cursor, the AI coding environment built by Anysphere.
- [Vlad Magdalin](https://wikihunt.co/vlad-magdalin/): Vlad Magdalin is a co-founder of Webflow, along with his brother Sergie Magdalin and Bryant Chou.
- [John O'Nolan](https://wikihunt.co/john-onolan/): John O'Nolan is the founder of Ghost and chief executive of the Ghost Foundation, the nonprofit that develops the open source publishing platform.
- [Chris Best](https://wikihunt.co/chris-best/): Chris Best is the co-founder and chief executive of Substack. Before it, he co-founded the messaging app Kik with Jairaj Sethi, who also became a Substack co-founder.
- [Tyler Denk](https://wikihunt.co/tyler-denk/): Tyler Denk is the co-founder and chief executive of beehiiv, the newsletter platform he started with Benjamin Hargett and Jake Hurd.
- [James Hawkins](https://wikihunt.co/james-hawkins/): James Hawkins is the co-founder and chief executive of PostHog, the open source product analytics company he started with Tim Glaser in January 2020.
- [Karri Saarinen](https://wikihunt.co/karri-saarinen/): Karri Saarinen is a co-founder of Linear, the issue tracking and product planning tool. Before Linear he worked at Airbnb and Coinbase.
- [Ivan Zhao](https://wikihunt.co/ivan-zhao/): Ivan Zhao is a co-founder and the chief executive of Notion Labs, the company behind the Notion workspace app.
- [Guillermo Rauch](https://wikihunt.co/guillermo-rauch/): Guillermo Rauch is an Argentine born software developer and entrepreneur, the founder and chief executive of Vercel and the creator of Next.js.
- [Paul Copplestone](https://wikihunt.co/paul-copplestone/): Paul Copplestone is the chief executive and co-founder of Supabase, the open source Postgres based backend platform he started with Ant Wilson.
- [Peer Richelsen](https://wikihunt.co/peer-richelsen/): Peer Richelsen is a co-founder of Cal.com, the open source scheduling platform. He co-founded it with Bailey Pumfleet and is the public voice of the company in its funding announcements.
- [Francesco Di Lorenzo](https://wikihunt.co/francesco-di-lorenzo/): Francesco Di Lorenzo is a co-founder of Typefully, the writing and scheduling app for social media creators, where he worked on the editor and the server side.
- [Josh Pigford](https://wikihunt.co/josh-pigford/): Josh Pigford is an American entrepreneur, the founder of Baremetrics and a prolific starter of small online projects. He is often known by his online handle Shpigford.
- [Marko Saric](https://wikihunt.co/marko-saric/): Marko Saric is a co-founder of Plausible Analytics, where he leads marketing, content, community and customer support. Uku Taht built the product and Saric joined him in 2019.
- [Gabriel Weinberg](https://wikihunt.co/gabriel-weinberg/): Gabriel Weinberg is an American entrepreneur and author, the founder and chief executive of DuckDuckGo.
- [Joel Spolsky](https://wikihunt.co/joel-spolsky/): Joel Spolsky is an American software engineer and entrepreneur, co-founder of Stack Overflow and of Fog Creek Software, and author of the long running blog Joel on Software.
- [Joel Gascoigne](https://wikihunt.co/joel-gascoigne/): Joel Gascoigne is a British entrepreneur, co-founder and chief executive of Buffer, the social media scheduling app.
- [Pat Walls](https://wikihunt.co/pat-walls/): Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story, the publication of founder interviews and case studies for aspiring entrepreneurs.
- [Nathan Barry](https://wikihunt.co/nathan-barry/): Nathan Barry is an American entrepreneur, the founder and chief executive of Kit, the creator email platform formerly known as ConvertKit.
- [Sahil Lavingia](https://wikihunt.co/sahil-lavingia/): Sahil Lavingia is an American entrepreneur, the founder of Gumroad, and a prominent writer on creator businesses and company building.
- [Dharmesh Shah](https://wikihunt.co/dharmesh-shah/): Dharmesh Shah is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of HubSpot, and the creator of the startup community OnStartups.
- [Ben Chestnut](https://wikihunt.co/ben-chestnut/): Ben Chestnut is an American entrepreneur and co-founder of Mailchimp, which he led as chief executive for more than twenty years until its sale to Intuit in 2021.
- [Wade Foster](https://wikihunt.co/wade-foster/): Wade Foster is an American entrepreneur, co-founder and chief executive of Zapier, the automation company he started in 2011 with Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop.
- [Tobias Lütke](https://wikihunt.co/tobias-lutke/): Tobias Lütke, known as Tobi, is a German Canadian entrepreneur and the chief executive and co-founder of Shopify. He built the platform in Ruby on Rails after trying to open an online snowboard shop.
- [Patrick Collison](https://wikihunt.co/patrick-collison/): Patrick Collison is an Irish entrepreneur, co-founder and chief executive of Stripe. He started the payments company in 2010 with his brother John and has also founded research initiatives outside business.
- [David Heinemeier Hansson](https://wikihunt.co/david-heinemeier-hansson/): David Heinemeier Hansson, known as DHH, is a Danish programmer and entrepreneur who created the Ruby on Rails web framework and is a partner and chief technology officer at 37signals. He is also a professional endurance racing driver.
- [Jason Fried](https://wikihunt.co/jason-fried/): Jason Fried is an American entrepreneur and author, co-founder and chief executive of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. He is known for promoting a calmer, smaller and more profitable way to run a software business.
- [Tony Dinh](https://wikihunt.co/tony-dinh/): Tony Dinh is a Vietnamese indie developer who created TypingMind, an interface for chatting with AI models. He is known for building small software products alone and for sharing his progress in public.
- [Marc Lou](https://wikihunt.co/marc-lou/): Marc Lou is a French indie maker best known for ShipFast, a Next.js boilerplate for launching web products quickly. He is known for building many small products in public and for using his audience to sell them.
- [Pieter Levels](https://wikihunt.co/pieter-levels/): Pieter Levels is an independent software maker, widely known online as levelsio, who created Nomad List and several other web products. He describes himself as an indie maker and is one of the best known examples of a solo founder.
- [Courtland Allen](https://wikihunt.co/courtland-allen/): Courtland Allen is an American software developer and entrepreneur who created Indie Hackers, the community for independent founders. He led it inside Stripe from 2017 and continued to run it after it became independent again in 2023.
- [Ryan Hoover](https://wikihunt.co/ryan-hoover/): Ryan Hoover is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded Product Hunt in 2013. He later started Weekend Fund, an early stage investment fund.
- [Beta tester](https://wikihunt.co/beta-tester/): A beta tester is a person outside the development team who uses a product before its general release and reports what works and what does not. Beta testers are usually customers or people like the intended customers.
- [Beta](https://wikihunt.co/beta/): A beta is a version of a product released to people outside the team before its general launch, so that real use can reveal problems the team did not find. It usually comes after the product has all its planned features and before the public release.
- [The Big Push](https://wikihunt.co/the-big-push/): The Big Push is the decision or event that moves a person from thinking about starting a business to actually doing it. It can be a personal turning point, an outside shock or a simple moment of readiness, and it often explains why one person starts and another stays at the idea stage.
- [Authority Management System](https://wikihunt.co/authority-management-system/): The Authority Management System, or AMS, is a framework for building and managing the authority of a website in a deliberate way. It organizes the work into a pillar and cluster structure, an entity stack and a distinction between numerical and contextual authority, and it applies to both on site and off site actions.
- [Compounding authority](https://wikihunt.co/compounding-authority/): Compounding authority is the idea that a site's or brand's credibility grows on top of itself, so that each new link, mention and page makes the next one easier to earn. It describes gradual accumulation, in contrast to one day spikes that fade.
- [Citation surface](https://wikihunt.co/citation-surface/): A citation surface is a source that answer engines and AI assistants draw on and name when they respond to questions. For a brand, being present on the citation surfaces that matter in its field increases the chance of being mentioned in generated answers.
- [Launch surface](https://wikihunt.co/launch-surface/): A launch surface is any place where a product can be presented to an audience as part of its launch. It may be a launch platform, a directory, a community, a list, a marketplace, a publication or any other site where the product can appear with its own entry or mention.
- [Omnimodal launch](https://wikihunt.co/omnimodal-launch/): An omnimodal launch is a product launch that builds presence across many formats and places at once, instead of relying on a single listing or a single day of attention. The idea is that lasting visibility comes from being found in many forms: pages, rankings, comparisons, answers, guides and mentions.
- [Vibe coding](https://wikihunt.co/vibe-coding/): Vibe coding is a way of building software by describing what you want to an AI model in plain language and accepting the code it produces, with little or no close reading of the result. The builder steers by trying the output and asking for changes.

## Pages

- [Cookie policy](https://wikihunt.co/cookies/): WikiHunt does not set cookies for tracking or advertising.
- [Financial interests](https://wikihunt.co/financial-interests/): WikiHunt is a BusinessHunt project and describes businesses, tools and publications that founders use. This page explains how that coverage relates to money.
- [AI disclosure](https://wikihunt.co/ai-disclosure/): WikiHunt uses artificial intelligence as a writing and research aid. It does not replace editorial judgment.
- [Editorial policy](https://wikihunt.co/editorial-policy/): Each entry is a short, factual description of one subject.
- [About](https://wikihunt.co/about/): WikiHunt is a BusinessHunt project: an encyclopedia of the launch ecosystem.
- [Site map](https://wikihunt.co/site-map/): Every portal, record and article on the site, in one place.
- [Browse records](https://wikihunt.co/records/)
- [Home](https://wikihunt.co/): Concepts, businesses, founders, tools and newsletters, written as short entries and linked to each other.
- [Newsletters A to Z](https://wikihunt.co/newsletters/)
- [Tools A to Z](https://wikihunt.co/tools/)
- [Founders A to Z](https://wikihunt.co/founders/)
- [Businesses A to Z](https://wikihunt.co/businesses/)
- [Concepts A to Z](https://wikihunt.co/concepts/)
- [AI and automation](https://wikihunt.co/ai-and-automation/): This portal covers the AI assistants, coding tools and automation platforms that founders use to build faster and work with fewer people.
- [Communities and communication](https://wikihunt.co/communities-and-communication/): This portal covers how founders reach people and talk to them: newsletters, communities, social media and email, along with the publications and companies built on them.
- [Tools and stack](https://wikihunt.co/tools-and-stack/): This portal covers the software a small team uses to build and run a product: hosting, databases, analytics, websites, planning and scheduling tools.
- [Revenue and funding](https://wikihunt.co/revenue-and-funding/): This portal covers how a product earns money and how a company is financed or sold: payments, subscriptions, pricing, bootstrapping, investors and acquisitions.
- [Authority and links](https://wikihunt.co/authority-and-links/): This portal covers how a site earns trust with search engines and AI assistants: backlinks, domain strength, topical coverage, entities and citations.
- [Distribution and growth](https://wikihunt.co/distribution-and-growth/): This portal brings together the ways a product reaches and keeps users: referrals, free tiers, product led growth, communities and loops that compound over time.
- [Launch platforms](https://wikihunt.co/launch-platforms/): This portal covers the sites and directories where new products are shown to an audience, from large launch platforms to smaller directories and curated lists.
- [Launching a product](https://wikihunt.co/launching-a-product/): This portal gathers what a founder needs to take a product from idea to its first public day: validating demand, scoping a first version, preparing a waiting list and choosing where and when to launch.


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