Attention you earn, not attention you buy.

I built Kingpin as a live arena for attention: a vertical, infinite-scroll feed and a board where any founder can put their product in front of people for free, and the crowd decides in real time whether it deserves to stay there. Getting in costs nothing. Votes decide how far you go.

I tried. The first Kingpin was a paid leaderboard, and then a hybrid where a bid set your baseline and votes moved you from there. Either way, money was the price of admission — and the founders with the best products were often the ones with the least to spend. A board that the deepest pocket can enter first isn’t telling anyone what’s actually good.

So listing is free now, and rank is earned: the confidence-weighted crowd vote plus freshness, so a new launch gets a fair shot and an old one has to keep earning its place. A card the crowd turns on is out at −5 steps. Founders pay only for optional tools — the monthly Verified badge and Kingpin Growth — and neither one moves you on the board.

I didn’t want a black-box ranking model or an engagement-maximizing feed deciding what people see. The inputs are a public vote count and the date a product was listed, and the formula that turns them into a rank lives in one file, unchanged for every card. What you see is what moved it there — I can point to the exact line of code that did it, and so can you.

Everything above is the board and the feed: the crowd, in public. Kingpin Growth is a different product living under the same roof — a founder-side tool that searches Hacker News and Reddit for people already talking about the problem your product solves, and drafts a reply with AI for you to review. It never posts anything on its own; you approve, edit, and post it yourself. See Pricing for how it’s sold, and the Rules for how it’s expected to be used.

I’m Suraj Mishra, and I built and run Kingpin myself — no team, no funding round. I’m posting the build as I go on X at @suraj__mishra__.

If you need to reach me — a takedown request, a billing question, a bug, or just feedback — email [email protected] or ping me on X. I read everything myself.