Back to the service. This is a worked sample on an invented brief, produced by running the Launch Map playbook with live fetches on 2026-10-15. Your order gets the same structure for your product.
Launch Map: a self-hosted status page tool (sample)
Prepared 2026-10-15. AI-written from public pages fetched on that date. It is research, not legal or marketing-performance advice. Nothing was submitted or posted for you, and nothing you supplied was run.
Sample brief (invented): "Statusbox", a free, MIT-licensed, single-binary status page generator for homelab and small-team self-hosters. First public release was 5 weeks ago. One developer, $0 budget, 3 hours a week, and no existing audience.
The answer first
- Do not start with the big general boards or the age-gated lists. Statusbox is 5 weeks old, and awesome-selfhosted asks for a first release "more than 4 months ago" [4], which it fails today. Reddit's r/selfhosted may also restrict new projects (one mirrored mod post, not fetched by us, says Fridays only), but Reddit blocked our fetch, so we could not confirm it: read the live sidebar before you post (see What we could not establish).
- Week 1 is Show HN. Product Hunt follows in week 2. Both are free and usable today. Show HN accepts "something you've made that other people can play with" and does not allow landing pages or sign-up pages [1]. Product Hunt's launch page, as read through a summarising fetcher (curl got 403, so not confirmed verbatim), says "It's 100% free to use" and that company accounts are prohibited [2]: launch from your personal account, and check that page yourself first.
- Lobsters is closed to you for now. It is invite-based and new users cannot use tags such as "show" [3]. Don't spend effort here until you have an invite from someone active on the site.
- Five candidate venues were unreadable to us. Reddit, Indie Hackers, SaaSHub and AlternativeTo returned 403 to our fetchers and BetaList showed only a login link, so they are listed under What we could not establish with no rule given, rather than guessed.
Your constraints as tests
| ID | Test | Basis (your words) |
|---|---|---|
| R1 | Free to list: no payment needed | "$0 budget" |
| R2 | Accepts an open-source developer tool from its own author | "one developer" |
| R3 | Usable now, or the date it becomes usable is known | "first release 5 weeks ago" |
| R4 | Reaches self-hosters or developers | "homelab and small-team self-hosters" |
| R5 | Total effort fits 3 hours a week | "3 hours a week" |
Venue table
Product Hunt cells carry an asterisk: read through a summarising fetcher, not confirmed verbatim (curl got 403).
| Venue | R1 free | R2 own work OK | R3 usable now | R4 audience | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Show HN | PASS (no fee is mentioned on the page) [1] | PASS [1] | PASS [1] | PARTIAL: developers, not only self-hosters (our inference) | Launch week 1 |
| Product Hunt | PASS* [2] | PASS* [2] | PASS* [2] | PARTIAL: general tech (our inference) | Launch week 2, personal account |
| Lobsters | PASS (no fee is mentioned on the page) [3] | PARTIAL: self-promo should be "less than a quarter" of your activity [3] | FAIL: invite needed [3] | PASS (our inference) | Wait |
| awesome-selfhosted | PASS (a pull request) [4] | PASS [4] | FAIL until the release is older than 4 months [4] | PASS | Date it: first release + 4 months |
| Self-Host Weekly (selfh.st) | UNKNOWN: the submit page content was not readable [5] | UNKNOWN | UNKNOWN | PASS (the site is self-hosting news, issue of 9 Oct 2026 seen) [5] | Submit and see |
| DevHunt | UNKNOWN: price of launching not stated on the pages we read; the site sells ads at "your ad here · $149/week" and "your ad here · $89/week" [6] | UNKNOWN | UNKNOWN | PARTIAL (dev tools) | Check the submit form yourself |
Recent activity seen on 2026-10-15, to show each venue is alive: Show HN new page, posts timestamped 2026-10-15 [8]; Lobsters newest page, stories timestamped 2026-10-14 [9]; selfh.st, issue dated 2026-10-09 [5]; DevHunt front page showing "9 upvotes today" [6]. Not established: awesome-selfhosted commit dates (GitHub was not readable by our fetchers) and Product Hunt (403).
Sequence for 3 hours a week
- Week 1 (3 h): Show HN on a Tuesday to Thursday morning US time (our suggestion, not a rule). Prep, in order: a demo link that needs no sign-up (Show HN asks you to make it "easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails" [1]), two screenshots, and a first comment that explains why you built it. Title:
Show HN: Statusbox, a single-binary status page for homelabs. Do not ask friends to vote [1][2][7]. - Week 2 (2 h): Product Hunt from your personal account. Prep: a gallery of 3 screenshots, a maker comment, the tagline below. Ask people to visit and comment, never to upvote [2].
- Week 3 (1 h): send the Self-Host Weekly submission through its submit page [5], with the repository link and a two-line description. Reddit's r/selfhosted: if its live sidebar allows a post for a project this age, post on the day it allows, and write the post yourself.
- Week 4 (1 h): answer comments and note which venue the visits came from, so you know where to spend the next month.
- First release + 4 months: open the awesome-selfhosted pull request yourself. The list bans machine-generated contributions "and will result in a ban" [4], so write the YAML entry by hand. We prepared nothing for it.
Wording that fits each venue
- Show HN title (60 characters):
Show HN: Statusbox, a single-binary status page for homelabs - Product Hunt tagline (59 characters):
A status page for your homelab in one binary and one config - Self-Host Weekly description (draft, 116 characters):
Statusbox is a single-binary status page generator for homelabs, MIT licensed, with one config file and no database.
What we could not establish
- r/selfhosted and Reddit generally (403 on fetch). A mirrored copy of a March 2026 mod post, "rules update: new project friday here to stay", was seen in a search result but not fetched, so we state no Friday rule as fact. Read the live sidebar.
- Indie Hackers, SaaSHub and AlternativeTo (403 on fetch).
- BetaList: our fetch got only a login link. An article we did fetch (dev.to, posted "Jun 15", no year) reports paid plans only; we could not confirm that on BetaList's own page. Not in the table.
- Whether DevHunt has a free launch route today.
- How much traffic any venue sends. No source we read measured it, so we make no traffic promise.
- Whether Show HN timing matters. The advice on days and hours above is ours, not a rule.
- Product Hunt's rules in verbatim form (only a summarising fetcher could read the page).
Sources (all fetched 2026-10-15 unless noted)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- https://www.producthunt.com/launch (403 to curl; read through a summarising fetcher, not confirmed verbatim)
- https://lobste.rs/about
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted-data/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
- https://selfh.st/ and https://selfh.st/submit/
- https://devhunt.org/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew
- https://lobste.rs/newest
QA log
Every rule above is quoted from a page fetched on the prepared date, except the Product Hunt rules (summarising fetcher, flagged) and the r/selfhosted mirror (not fetched, flagged and not used for any verdict). Six venues were assessed, 24 test cells filled, and 6 are UNKNOWN. Character counts were computed by the build script. No venue was recommended that fails a must-have. Nothing was submitted, posted or run.