Every week my feed has another "we just hit 10k visitors" post with a cropped screenshot. Maybe it's true. There's no way to tell. So I built Pingsold: a startup directory where the ranking comes from each startup's own analytics, read-only, synced daily. Nobody can type in a number, including me, and paying never changes a rank.
The idea still feels right to me. The numbers so far are humbling:
8 startups listed. 2 verified. Both of them are mine.
Six founders found Pingsold, filled in the form, got a listing page... and never connected their analytics. Which means they never appear on the leaderboard, which is the whole point of the site.
Why I think they don't connect
I went through 50+ startup launch sites this week (Product Hunt alternatives, launch boards, directories) to see what founders actually do there. Most of them ask for almost nothing: paste a URL, an AI fills the form, add a badge, done. Pingsold asks for something much bigger, and I think I was asking for it the wrong way.
Trust. "Connect your Google Analytics" to a site you found yesterday is a big ask, even read-only, even with Google's OAuth verification done.
Small numbers. Most early founders have 50–500 visitors a month. Publishing that next to a bigger startup feels bad.
No visible payoff. A rank on a board with two verified startups isn't worth much yet. Chicken and egg.
Timing. I asked after they'd submitted. By then they already had what they came for (a listing page and a link), and "I'll do it later" never comes.
Effort. Finding where your API key lives, or which GA4 property is the right one, is friction at exactly the wrong moment.
What I changed (shipped this week)
Verification moved inside the submit flow. It's now 3 steps: Details → Verify traffic → Review & submit. You can still skip, but the ask comes while you're in "launch mode".
We detect your analytics tool. After step 1, Pingsold checks your homepage for GA4, Plausible, Fathom, PostHog or DataFast and leads with it: "We found Plausible on yoursite.com — connect it in one click."
A "show as a range" switch, right there. "1K–5K" instead of "1,240". This was the objection I underestimated.
"Exactly what we'll read". A card showing what's public, what's only used to verify, and what we never read (individual visitors, IPs, page paths, revenue).
Instant payoff. The moment you connect, you see your verified number and where you'd rank: "You'd be #3 of 9".
Something worth showing off. A live badge for your own site that says "Verified on Pingsold" with your real visitors for yesterday, the last 7 days or the last 30 days, updated daily. The plain "Listed on Pingsold" badge has no number, so the badge itself is the reason to verify.
A bit of ceremony. Confetti when you verify, when you submit, and when you go live. Silly, but launches should feel like launches.
On the review step, skipped listings now show the muted "Not verified" label right in the preview, so you see the difference before you submit.
What I'd love your take on
Would you connect your analytics to a directory? If not, what would change your mind?
Exact numbers or ranges: which would you pick, honestly?
Is a verified traffic badge something you'd actually put on your site?
If you run a startup and want to try the new flow, it's free: pingsold.com/submit. I read every reply, and I'll post the numbers in a month — whether this moved the 2 out of 8 or not.
Top comments (3)
Reading this from the submitter's side, the six founders are probably not lazy. When I submitted our app to directories this autumn, each submission ended with a small list of later tasks, connect this, add that, claim the page, and nearly all of them died, because the listing itself was the reward and my own product work was calling louder. The only later steps I actually finished were the ones that visibly changed the listing I had just received. Have you tried showing unverified startups as ghost rows in the leaderboard itself, with the rank they would hold today greyed out? Right now not connecting costs a founder nothing visible. A grey row with their name on it might be the first cost that is hard to ignore.
You're right, and it changed how I'm thinking about it. I'd been treating the unverified founders as a reminder-email problem. You're saying it's a design problem: right now not connecting is free, because their listing looks fine either way.
Today those startups sit below the board in "Listed, not ranked yet", where nobody looks, including them. Moving them into the board as grey rows would make the gap hard to miss. The only thing I'd change is the rank: without their analytics I don't have a number, so it would be a "?" rather than a guessed position. Pingsold only works if every number on it is real.
Really useful to hear this from someone who's been through the submission grind. Thank you.
Thank you for reading it that closely. The "?" is the right call, and honestly it might work even better than a guessed rank, because a question mark with your own name on it is exactly the kind of unfinished thing people go back to finish. And you are right that the numbers have to stay real, that is the whole reason your board is worth trusting.
Ranges, every time. At 50–500 visitors a month, an exact number next to a bigger startup reads as a ranking of failure, while a band like "100–500, verified" reads as "real and growing". I'd also flip the order: list them first, send them something useful (referral clicks from your directory, a weekly "people viewed you" note), and ask for the analytics connection once they've seen a payoff. Connecting on day one to a site found yesterday is a trust ask with no return yet.
One more idea: let founders verify a single metric they choose (signups, revenue band, or traffic) rather than the whole analytics account. Smaller ask, same honesty.
Disclosure: we build directory software at Wbcom Designs, and "claim first, verify later" is the pattern we've seen get listings to engage.