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We rebuilt our replay engine. Webhook replays are 40x faster now
Three weeks ago a customer replayed 2 million events and our queue melted. Here is what we changed, what it cost, and the numbers before and after.
The community
Built for the thing every other community bans: self‑promotion.
Everywhere else, posting your own product is a violation. Here it is the point: founders pitch their own work under their own names, vote on everyone else's, and none of it can be bought. One of your distribution channels, run honestly.
Built for self-promotion
Every feature does one thing: gets your product seen without apologizing for it. No "no self-promo" rules. No getting buried. Just founders making the climb together.
CAMP 01 · PITCHES
Promote every week. Unapologetically.
A launch, an update, a milestone, or an ask: one pitch every seven days, in front of founders who chose to be here for it. Pitches anchor to your product's listing, and publishing one lands on your expedition log as a placement, the same as any directory. Nobody calls it spam. Nobody gets buried.
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Your launch post
CAMP 02 · VOTES
Votes you cannot buy
Upvotes are weighted by member standing. Brand-new accounts barely move the needle, vote rings stand out to moderation, and there is no downvote pile-on. The only way up is a product people rate.
CAMP 03 · CONVERSATIONS
Talk to founders, not followers
Threaded comments from people shipping the same week you are, and direct messages to anyone who opts in. Feedback, partnerships, first customers: it starts in the replies.
CAMP 04 · LISTINGS
Your product, permanently findable
A page of its own in the directory: tagline, screenshots, pricing, link. Every pitch you post is archived there as the climb, your product's story so far. Server-rendered and schema-marked, built so search engines and AI assistants can find it and cite it long after your launch day.
CAMP 05 · THE SUMMIT
Be the answer, not the ad
Every route ranks its products by weighted votes: this week, this month, all time. Summit your route and you are what comes back when someone asks for the best tool in your category. Nothing on the board can be bought.
CAMP 06 · THE BADGE
Leave with a dofollow backlink
List your product, get approved, and put the Marked on IndieAscent badge on your site. Our crawler verifies it and your listing's link flips to dofollow, rechecked weekly. No tiers, no payments. The badge is the whole deal.
Six camps. One climb. Your product at the top of its route.
Start your ascentNothing about the ranking is for sale
The audience is worth reaching because the board cannot be bought.
- Money never buys rank, votes, or extra pitches
- Sponsors exist, labeled SPONSORED, carrying rel sponsored links, never above rank 1 and never inside a ranked list
- Launch-day pins sit in their own labeled strip and never touch rankings
- Links in pitches and comments are always nofollow; the dofollow link is earned with the badge and nothing else
- Your expedition log never affects votes, rankings, or your link
This is one of your channels, not the pitch. The tool half of IndieAscent works whether or not you ever post here: the expedition log does not care. But a room where self-promotion is the point, filled with people who build for a living, is a channel most products never get.
Joining is free, and so is listing. See pricing for what the paid parts are, and what is deliberately not among them.