Why I built a race instead of another directory
A directory gives you a listing. Product Hunt gives you a day. runs.space gives you a race that never ends, where money can't buy a single point of fuel. Here is how I got there, and what the first weeks taught me.
I built a product directory first. It was clean, fast, fully working, and for a month almost nobody submitted anything.
That month taught me more than any launch has. The pages were fine. The problem was the shape of the idea. A directory is a list, and a list gives people exactly one reason to show up: to be on it. Once you're listed, nothing changes, nothing is at stake, and there is no reason to come back next week.
A directory is a place. A launch is an event. Neither one is a habit.
Product Hunt has the opposite problem. A launch day is a spike. You spend weeks preparing, you get a day of attention, and by the next morning it is gone. For a small product with no audience, that is a brutal trade: all the effort goes into twenty-four hours that most people will miss.
I wanted something in between. Something that had the stakes of a launch, the permanence of a directory, and a reason for people to return every single week.
The idea: make launching a race that never ends
On runs.space every product is a rocket. It starts on the pad at zero and climbs toward orbit at 500 fuel. Fuel comes from other people, one real vote at a time. There are two races running on the same track at once:
- The weekly sprint. Whoever collects the most fuel this week, Monday to Sunday, wins that week's prize pool.
- The eternal marathon. Your total fuel never resets. Reach 500 and your rocket enters orbit for good, with a permanent page and a place in the Hall of Fame.
Nothing dies. A rocket that misses a week is still on the track the next one. That one rule changes how it feels to take part: you are not racing a deadline, you are building momentum.
The rule everything else bends around
Money buys visibility. It never buys fuel.
If you can buy fuel, the leaderboard stops meaning anything, and a prize attached to it becomes a payout on a rigged game. So I wrote the rule first and built the rest around it:
- Fuel is always spent on someone else's rocket. You cannot fuel your own, and the server enforces it, not just the button.
- Every account gets a small daily budget to give away: 3 fuel a day on the free Walker tier, 10 on Runner, plus one 5x Super Fuel vote a week.
- Runner never adds fuel to your own rocket. It buys you a bigger voice for supporting others, and it funds the prize pool.
- Orbit can't be purchased. It is earned, and that is the one thing I will never sell.
People who pay directories mostly want the backlink, not the competition. So there is a parallel, honest product for them: the Hangar Pass buys a permanent page at your own subdomain. It carries no Hall of Fame and no prize eligibility, so it can never be confused with the thing that is earned.
The prize pool, said plainly
The pool is 50% of Runner entries, and the winner takes all of it. I did not seed it with my own money, so some weeks it is small and some weeks it is zero. The contest rules say exactly that, because a prize that quietly depends on a founder's savings is not a prize anyone should trust. Every racing rocket is eligible, free ones included.
What seeding the first race taught me
An empty race looks dead, so I pre-filled the track with reserved pads: real products by real builders, shown as dashed ghosts at the launch ring. They collect no fuel and are in the running for nothing. Putting someone's product in a directory is defensible. Entering them into a cash contest they never agreed to is not, so a ghost pad makes no claim on anyone's behalf until its owner decides to take it.
Here is the honest result, as of October 3, 2026. Six rockets are racing, three of them mine. Twenty-five pads are reserved. Weeks of friendly outreach to the people named on those pads has produced no claims, while two other accounts signed up and launched three rockets of their own.
Asking famous people to take a pad was never going to be the engine. The engine is people who have something to launch and a reason to tell others about it. So the next stretch of work is about making the race worth sharing: pages and images that carry real stakes, a place to write about what we learn, and a track that looks alive even when it is small.
What it feels like now
The race page is a launch silo: every rocket stands on a ring and climbs a glowing cylinder as fuel arrives, with orbit as the gold ring at the top. Height is pure fuel. A paid boost can add a halo, never altitude. If a rocket reaches orbit, the whole cylinder knows.
It is small and early, and I would rather say so than dress it up. If you are building something, launch it. It's free, it takes a minute, and it lasts longer than a day. If you would rather just help, pick a rocket on the race and fuel it. Someone real will notice.
Launch a rocket for free, or fuel someone else's. Every point is a real person's vote.