The FireLaunch guide.

A launch board for indie makers. Submit your product, get a dofollow backlink, and earn a permanent spot on the site if you can build real engagement in your first week. One-time payment, never a subscription.

We're different from Product Hunt in three ways. First, the dofollow backlink is real and durable — it's the point, not a side effect. Second, your placement compounds via the Spark score instead of expiring after 24 hours. Third, listings that earn it cross into The Forge — a curated set that stays visible forever with a ◆ badge.

• Dofollow backlink. Permanent, not nofollow, not redirect. Passes link equity to your site for as long as your listing is live.
• Human review. Every submission is reviewed by a real person before going live. No bot-spam, no junk listings competing for attention.
• Spark + Forge. Build engagement in week one and you get a permanent ◆ placement. Earn it once, keep it.
• Karma economy. Supporting other makers earns you karma you can redeem for free perks (Spark Boost, relaunch credit, Curator's Pick).

Hit the Launch button in the topbar (or paste your URL on the home page and hit submit). The form takes about ten minutes if you write everything fresh; faster if you let autofill scrape your site for the basics.

What you'll fill in:

• Title, tagline (60 chars), short description (500 chars), and a long-form body (up to 5000 chars, supports Markdown).
• Logo + up to 5 gallery screenshots. Logos look best square; screenshots look best landscape at ≥1200px wide.
• Category, sub-category, tech stack, external links (GitHub / X / demo).
• Tier and launch date. Pre-launch listings get a future date, “launched” listings go live after review.

After submit, free Kindling listings are scheduled about a week out (~7 days) and human-reviewed before they go live. Paid tiers (Ember/Blaze/Founder) skip the line — go live as soon as today — with a 24h review SLA, faster for Blaze+.

Full feature matrix lives on the pricing page.

Spark is your listing's live heat score, computed from five inputs: votes, clicks, dwell time, comments, and your own activity (replies + shipped updates). Each input has a fixed weight in the formula, and the whole score decays over time if no new activity comes in.

Votes are karma-weighted: a vote from an engaged supporter counts more than a vote from a brand-new account, which prevents drive-by upvote farming.

Cross 250 Spark in your first 7 days and you earn permanent placement in The Forge.

Full deep dive on the Spark page.

Karma is what you give the community — votes, comments, referrals. Orthogonal to Spark (which is what your listing earns). Karma weights your vote in the Spark formula and unlocks perk redemptions.

• Vote a listing: +1 karma
• Substantive comment (≥30 chars): +3
• Maker replies to your comment: +2
• Refer a maker who signs up: +5
• Refer a maker who lists: +15

Spend karma on perks at the karma redemption page: 50 karma → free Spark Boost, 150 → relaunch credit, 500 → Curator's Pick week. All three are live today.

Full table + the full Karma economy on the Karma page.

The Forge is permanent placement. Listings that cross 250 Spark in their first 7 days are inducted forever, get the ◆ badge on every public surface, and rank above non-Forge listings in default sort orders.

Forge listings own a sitewide ranking boost, get a permanent home on the Forge page, and feed the Curator's pool. They're the listings we point at when journalists ask “what's good on FireLaunch right now.”

Vote velocity in the first six hours matters more than anything else for Forge eligibility. Quick checklist:

• Polish the listing the day before — full tagline, body, gallery, external links.
• Build a notify-me list ahead of time so your launch-day audience is already in your corner.
• Pre-write social posts for X, LinkedIn, and any Discord / Reddit / Slack you have access to.
• Have a 2-3 line reply queued for the first comment.
• Refresh your dashboard around launch-day morning. Notify-me subscribers get emailed automatically the moment it flips live.
• Reply to every comment that lands in the first 24h. Maker presence drives engagement multiplicatively.

Once a listing has been live for 90 days, you can re-launch it from your dashboard. A re-launch re-stamps your lastLaunchedAt and resets the Forge eligibility window — meaning you get a fresh 7-day shot at the 250 Spark threshold if you didn't make it the first time.

Kindling re-launches are free. Paid tiers spend one re-launch credit (granted on tier purchase: Blaze +1, Founder +12/yr, karma redemption at 150). The re-launch form asks for a short “what's new” note that surfaces on the listing page so visitors know it's shipped progress.

Every listing — including pre-launch ones — has a notify-me form. Visitors enter an email, get a double-opt-in confirmation, and receive exactly ONE email when the listing flips live.

As your notify-me list grows, you get milestone emails at 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, and 1000 subscribers — useful for gauging pre-launch demand.

Mark any listing as acquisition-ready and an inquiry form appears on its public page. Interested buyers fill in name, email, optional budget, and a note. We forward the lead to you and step back — FireLaunch doesn't broker, the conversation happens off-platform.

Acquisition listings carry a “$ For sale” pill across the site and live in the Acquisitions browse page.

One-time paid placements for visibility beyond your listing's organic Spark. Most popular:

• Sponsor Rail — labeled sponsor card on the homepage. $49/week.
• Featured extension — extra time at the top of your category.
• Newsletter sponsor — slot in the Sunday digest.
• Spark Boost — +100 Spark for 48 hours. Pushes you back into leaderboard contention.

Full list + pricing on the pricing page.

Refer makers and earn 50% lifetime commission on their first paid tier purchase. We pay out monthly via Stripe Connect Express. Tracked via a 60-day attribution cookie.

Sign up + get your referral link on the Affiliates page.

Account management lives at /account — name, profile photo, email, password, 2FA, connected accounts, active sessions. Backed by Clerk.

Email categories (digest, daily Spark report, comment notifications, milestone alerts, etc.) are independently togglable. Every email we send carries an unsubscribe link that drops you from JUST that category — not from all FireLaunch email.