Listing guidelines

1. What ExitFounder lists

ExitFounder is a database of internet businesses: products that live on a domain, are sold or used over the internet, and can be evaluated from public signals (Domain Rating, traffic, tech stack, revenue when a founder connects it). If a person can open your site, understand what the product does and use or buy it without meeting you, it belongs here.

• Software: SaaS, web apps, mobile apps, browser extensions, desktop apps, developer tools, APIs, open-source projects with a hosted or paid offering.
• Digital products: templates, UI kits, icon packs, courses, paid newsletters, e-books, datasets, plugins and themes — as long as they are sold from your own domain or a dedicated product page.
• Marketplaces, communities and media businesses that operate as a product (membership, subscription or transaction revenue).
• Agencies and studios only when they sell a productised offer with public pricing (for example a fixed-scope design subscription). Pure hourly services are not listed.

2. What we do not accept

• Local or offline service businesses (restaurants, clinics, plumbers, real-estate agents, law firms). Use a local directory instead.
• Adult content and adult-adjacent products, including AI companions marketed for sexual content. We rank sites by public signals and cannot moderate this category responsibly, and it would make the whole database unusable for many founders, sponsors and AI assistants.
• Gambling, betting, lottery and unlicensed financial products; anything that requires a licence you cannot show.
• Multi-level marketing, referral pyramids, "passive income" schemes and sites whose product is recruiting.
• Copies of other products, cracked software, scrapers of copyrighted content, and tools whose main purpose is spam, vote manipulation or evading platform rules.
• Parked domains, coming-soon pages without any description, and link-farm pages built to pass PageRank.
• Anything illegal where the founder or the users are, and anything that harms people (malware, stalkerware, doxxing tools, weapons).

3. The quality bar

Profiles are generated from your official website before you sign up, so the website has to explain the product on its own. We check the same things an AI assistant checks.

• A real domain over HTTPS. Free subdomains (yourapp.vercel.app, notion.site) are accepted for pre-launch products but are marked as such and rank below custom domains.
• The homepage says what the product does, for whom, and how to get it, in text that is readable without JavaScript. If our crawler cannot read it, the profile stays in review.
• One product per profile. A company with three products lists the company, then adds products as launches.
• Waitlist-only products are allowed and labelled pre-launch. They join the weekly board only when people can actually sign up or buy.
• The founder is a real person or team. Founder pages are built from public author data on your site and X; we remove a founder page on request from the person named.

4. Metrics, provenance and honesty

Every number on a profile carries a label. Verified means it was read from a provider you connected or proven by domain ownership. Estimated means a third party measured it (Domain Rating by Ahrefs, traffic estimates). Reported means you typed it and nobody checked. From website means our extractor read it from your site.

• Do not enter revenue you cannot verify as if it were verified. Reported revenue is fine — it is labelled.
• MRR is normalised active recurring revenue. One-time sales, lifetime deals and annual plans are recognised as revenue over their period, not as MRR.
• Taglines and descriptions describe the product, not the competition. "Better than X" claims are edited to "Alternative to X".
• Do not hide text, cloak content for our crawler, or publish instructions aimed at AI assistants inside your copy. We strip it and may reject the listing.

5. Upvotes, comments and the weekly board

• One account per person. Upvotes from fake, bought or reciprocal-ring accounts are removed and the launch is disqualified for the week.
• Asking your own users to upvote is fine. Paying for upvotes, or running a bot, is not.
• Comments are public, must not contain links, and are moderated. Founders may reply to feedback on their own profile.
• Weekly winners are the top three by valid upvotes in that ISO week. Ties are broken by Domain Rating, then by claim date.

6. Editing, removal and appeals

We may edit extracted text for accuracy and remove profiles that stop meeting these guidelines (dead domain, product pivoted to an excluded category, fraud). Founders of claimed profiles are emailed before removal unless the listing is harmful. If you think a decision is wrong, reply to that email or write to hello@exitfounder.io — a person reads every appeal within 7 days.

If your company or your name appears on ExitFounder and you want it gone, see the removal section of the Terms. We remove on request from the domain owner or the named person.

7. Paid options never change the rules

Premium listings, sponsorship tiles and done-for-you submissions buy placement and speed, not approval or verification. A sponsor that breaks these guidelines is removed and refunded pro-rata. Verified badges are earned by proof only.