startupfans

every startup that signed up so far (14):

1. startupfans — Be a fan before we're famous.
2. Pink Gloves Club — Lace em' up. Knock em' out
3. Pact Pals — Make fitness your side quest.
4. RooQL — The DuckDB of semantic layers
5. miniti — speech coach and meeting assistant
6. Giftey — agentic gifts
7. Gemma Analytics — Data & AI
8. NOS
9. Lightdash
10. Shrine — Build your agents a cozy shrine
11. Coconauts — your partner in web and application development
12. Lightverse — Analytics for all
13. Hive — What one agent learns, the whole hive knows.
14. Wolf — Your office fixer. Office orders, sorted.

oldest → newest. pages stay at /s/.

launchathon update.

pitch

• onlyfans for startups. one public feed per company, posted by the whole team. free for fans and startups.

what we shipped

• live product at startupfans.co: company pages, posts (text / image / video), global + company feeds, follows, replies, reactions, reshares, mentions, notifications, slack publishing, team invites, leaderboard
• mcp server so grok bot (and other oauth clients) can post, follow and reply as a signed-in member

traction right now

• 47 fans, 14 startups, 47 public updates

how we launched

• microlaunch listing live (product 5.0, idea 4.2, ~10 supporters)
• linkedin: whiteboard / onlyfans-for-startups posts from the team (irakli's launch post + follow-ons)
• luma demo night london: wed 21 oct, 6–9pm, lightdash office. 10 going already demos in: agentshrine / shrine, goodtalkdaily, hal's satellite roofing quoting tool, miniti, kinfamily, pitch, tori's magic tricks
• grok bots on x: launch drafts + bot-driven posts (mcp + x) to push the product and selected startups
• cold email to founders: "you've been selected", personalised hooks off recent ships / launches
• vc angle: sign up, then nominate 3 pre-seed portfolio companies (signal between monthly investor updates)
• company angle: turn the #wins channel into a public feed for marketing, gtm, hiring and fundraising

what worked

• day 1: hype around the product mattered more than having something working delightfully
• the joke gets the click. being opinionated / controversial beats being polite
• day 2: early adopters helped. a big name would have helped more
• a tight group of ~10 people who actually want to use it beats casting a wide net
• open signup turned into real startups and posts fast
• luma filled with real demos in a day. offline demand is there
• shipping a real feed (not waitlist-only) made every other channel usable

what didn't

• personal network / dms converted less than expected. maybe the product wasn't that interesting yet :)
• cold outbound is slow for a 3-day window. replies trickle
• vc nominate ask is high-friction cold. warm intros would do better
• directories alone don't fill the feed. you still hand-onboard startups
• skipped the founding-spot paywall. free was the right call for launch

maybe next

• london demo night next week as the distribution spike
• slack emoji → post so the feed fills itself
• keep hand-onboarding a small eager group so the feed stays good
• careers embed / verified metrics later if this sticks

startupfans is a PRODUCT OF THE DAY!!!!!!!!!!

at the Lightdash offsite in Lisbon, shipping StartupFans - something I've always wanted to build. It's one for those that build in public, and those that want to follow them, without all the other trash and ads you can get in legacy social media platforms.

Everyone is a builder and seller now - StartupFans is the place to be!

what's going on here @rohan?

first post. we're building startupfans in the open and this is where the updates land. follow along.