Ah, right, I see. So it was just showing me the marketing ones by random chance!
It seems a bit odd to offer per-category leaderboards only, especially on the front page, especially if it's going to randomise which one to show with only minimal feedback that it's doing that.
The first startup I ever worked for made IT integrate about a dozen different marketing SaaS because each one was able to convince the department that it would enable them to become the next generation of rockstar sales people.
Hi HN, I made this challenge with the goal of encouraging indie founders to focus on growth for a few months.
The challenge is simple, get 100 new paying customers in 100 days.
If you sign up, your project will be added to the leaderboard on the homepage (now filterable by category!).
Starting on Monday we'll be collecting weekly updates, verified by screenshots, to confirm how many new users you've added.
If you take the challenge and succeed you'll have passed the proof-of-concept faze and graduated to the I'm-building-a-business faze of your startup journey. Good luck!
Hey- thanks for making this. I heard about it from indie hackers and I'm pretty psyched to participate. Just hanging out with the other thirsty AF indie founders on slack has made this a cool experience so far. (I doubt I'm going to get to 100, but I guess you never know)
I liked it and felt it fit the vibe of scrappy founders making it work. I still like it.
re trust-worthiness in design. Design is always communicating something. Sometimes it's "I'm a bank you should give me your money" and other times it's "This person/company isn't very good at building website".
re trusting me in particular. I've been running the community behind this challenge, Indie Worldwide, for a couple years now and haven't f'd up too bad yet.
The font looks fun and not serious which lowers trust level. The depth of the lines are narrow and give the appearance of a drip. Reminds me of a partial halloween font.
I'm encourage everyone who is building a SaaS to join this. You don't have to do this challenge but they have a thing call "Mastermind groups" basically a way for you to connect to other founders weekly at a certain time to sync/share feedback.
From my own experience to launch my https://hanami.run email forwarding SaaS app, a weekly sync with my friends are my life hack to bring the idea to life, it forces to work, celebrate small changes/win with friend. Thing like I managed to got 100 visitors to landing page last week are now so awesome to tell my friends and keep me motivated.
Building on the dark in the past make me think I'm a falure and just jump ship to other brighter idea.
IIRC that filter only runs on initial submissions, so you should be able to edit the 100 back in.
In any case, I think the copy on the website is much clearer (“100 paying users in 100 days”). I initially interpreted the title to mean startups are paying “users” to beta-test/astroturf services.
Is that the only thing anyone makes any more? Surely there have to be some actual products in the world to be marketed?