787 tools for developers. 5 for nurses. Two weeks of tracking 14,000 indie launches.
I'm building a thing that watches products from 12 launch platforms and checks every one of them daily to see if it's still running. 14,303 in there right now. Over a thousand new ones come in every day and get analyzed with AI to work out what they are and who would need them.
That last part is where the interesting data lives, so here it is.
Every product gets filed under who does the work. Live over tracked:
Developers 711/787
Marketers 377/404
Freelancers 341/389
Students 292/322
Designers 128/141
Online sellers 120/127
Teachers 92/102
Construction & trades 91/96
Hiring & HR 88/96
Clinics 83/92
Restaurants 64/71
Musicians 48/54
Salons & barbers 41/46
Accountants 29/34
Shipping & logistics 29/37
Real estate 22/23
Legal 21/25
Aviation 16/17
Vets 6/7
Security 5/5
Nurses 5/5
787 tools for developers. 5 for nurses. There are something like 28 million nurses working right now. That list isn't a map of where the problems are, it's a map of who's building.
The second number worth sitting with. 4,859 products have no shipping streak and no Hacker News mention. Nothing has happened to them since the day they launched. That's about a third of everything tracked.
Some go fast. There are rows in the went-quiet list marked "watched for 1 days", which means we found them on launch day and by the next morning the site was already gone.
I don't think the lesson is "go build for nurses". Clinics have 92 tools and plenty of those will die too, because you don't reach a nurse from a launch post. The lesson is smaller. Where you have distribution and where the need is unmet are almost never the same place, and most of us pick the first one and call it validation.
There's already a page that shows all of this. It's rough and I'm still building it, but the shape is clear enough to talk about, because the same data answers three things a founder actually wants to know after launch day ends.
Who else is in my lane, and are they still moving. You pick a set of products and watch them. When they ship, when they go quiet, when someone outside the product brings them up somewhere public.
Which fields are actually moving. Not which are crowded. A field with 92 tools where nothing has shipped in a month is a completely different bet from a field with 30 where half of them shipped this week, and right now nobody can see the difference between those two.
And where to find people once the launch traffic is gone. That's the part nobody warns you about. Day one you get a few hundred visitors and day three you get eleven, and the people who were looking for exactly your thing show up in week six, on a day when nothing is pointing at you.
That last one is the business model, or the plan for one anyway. The site stays free for people looking for tools. Founders who want the view from the other side pay for it. Nothing is charged yet and I'd rather the data be worth paying for before I ask.
Caveat worth saying out loud. This is two weeks of data. Ask me in 90 days for a real survival curve.
Question for the room. If you've built for a field you don't work in, how did you get the first ten users?
tablif.com if you want to poke at the raw thing.
Same product, and I'd say the split runs inside the distribution itself rather than across fields.
Flyout started as a developer tool, built by a developer, for developers, and the launch channel that worked first, Product Hunt, was developer-heavy for exactly that reason. The bet paid off fast there because the audience already existed on the platform.
But the actual need, a quick note you can pull up without breaking flow, isn't developer-specific. Once that became obvious, the marketing copy moved toward everyday scenarios instead of dev jargon, and a separate set of pages went up for the searches non-developers actually type: sticky notes, quick notes, floating notes. None of that traffic comes from a launch platform. It's slow, organic, and a completely different acquisition motion running in parallel with the fast one.
Matches your point about distribution and unmet need rarely overlapping, just visible within one product instead of across two.
Machine Arena team here. The week six line is the realest thing in this post, and it matches our logs almost exactly. We publish daily across several channels and went through week after week of windows where attributed signups were zero. When the first real signups finally landed, they all came through one surface, traceable to one creator's post, weeks into the grind. From the aggregate view we looked exactly like a row in your went-quiet list the whole time.
Which is the caveat I'd flag for the survival data: your quiet cohort at two weeks will include products sitting in that week six trough, alive but not yet discoverable by any signal you track. Shipping streak measures whether the builder is moving. It says nothing about whether demand ever got a chance to arrive. A product that shipped nothing for a month but got its first outside mention in week six is a better bet than one shipping daily to nobody, and right now those two would sort the same or even backwards.
So a metric suggestion, since you asked what founders would actually want: time to first external mention, by category. You already track outside mentions for the lane view. The distribution of how long that takes per field would tell a founder whether their silence is normal for their lane or a verdict. We would have paid for that during the zero weeks, because the thing we lacked was not traffic advice, it was a base rate to compare our silence against.
On your direct question about first ten users in a field you don't work in: what worked for us was not finding where the audience hangs out in general, but finding the handful of people already publishing to that audience and earning our way into their threads before ever mentioning the product. Slower than a launch. Compounds better.
I'm curious what convinced you the core problem is camera avoidance rather than the effort of consistently turning ideas into publishable content.
From the people who've tried Voclip, do they keep using it because they dislike being on camera, or because recording a voice note becomes the fastest path from an idea to something they're actually willing to post?