Plug Your Build
Built for makers, not launch days.
Every indie launch follows the same arc.
Weeks of build-up. One chaotic day on Product Hunt. A traffic spike that decays to zero by Thursday. A nofollow link buried under fifty other launches the next morning. Three months later, nobody can find your product unless they remember its name.
I shipped my last build, watched the curve die within 96 hours, and decided launches shouldn't be the business model. Permanence should be.
That's the thesis behind Plug Your Build — an indie maker directory where:
Listings are permanent. Approved once, listed forever. No "trending today" decay.
Every link is dofollow. Backlinks compound from day one. SEO works for you while you're sleeping, not just on launch day.
Every submission gets human review. No bots. No "AI Crypto Scheduler Pro." A real person reads everything within 24 hours.
Every kind of indie build is welcome. Not just SaaS — newsletters, courses, Gumroad assets, Etsy crafts, Discord servers, podcasts, productized services.
The free tier is a backlink trade: embed a badge on your site (one line of HTML), get a permanent dofollow listing. If you'd rather skip the trade and pick your placement, there's a paid tier.
What I've learned so far:
Permanent listings have a fundamentally different traffic shape than launch-day pages. Trickle vs spike. Compounding vs one-and-done. Makers describe it as "boring in a good way."
Dofollow matters more than indie makers realize. Most directories quietly nofollow your listing once they have your money — always inspect the actual HTML before paying anyone. A DA-25 directory with dofollow beats a DA-60 directory with nofollow for SEO, every time.
Human review reads as a feature, not friction. Makers tell me they trust the directory because it's not algorithmic, and that trust shows up in browsers' clickthroughs.
Where I'm at (real numbers — please be gentle):
listings live
monthly visitors
Sunday digest subscribers
$100 MRR (paid tier launched 1 week ago)
Stack: Next.js 15, Clerk, Stripe, PostHog, Postgres. ~$150/mo to run.
What I'd love from you:
Brutal feedback on the homepage and submission flow. What's unclear? Where did you bounce?
List your build. Free with the badge. I'd genuinely love IH makers in next Sunday's digest.
Tell me what's broken. Categories I'm missing? A feature you'd actually pay for? Reply here or DM me — I read everything.
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