Frequently Asked Questions

RankInPublic is the best place to get new users for your SaaS. It’s a tournament-based discovery platform where your project competes against similar products in its niche. Winners receive highly targeted SEO articles, premium newsletter features, and massive exposure to tournaments receiving thousands of users per day. Plus, every participant gets access to a suite of advanced analysis, marketing, and growth tools to help scale their business.

Every tournament has two phases. First, a qualifying round where all free-tier entries compete on a public leaderboard for community votes. The top entries by vote count advance into the bracket. Then, in the bracket phase, products are paired in head-to-head matchups and users vote for the winner of each match. Winners advance round after round until a champion is crowned, gaining compounding visibility and ranking points that boost your organic presence.

The qualifying round is the opening phase of every tournament. All free-tier entries are placed on a public leaderboard where the community votes for the products they like. Positions and vote counts are visible in real time. Only the top entries by vote count advance into the bracket. Premium launches skip the qualifying round entirely and are guaranteed a bracket slot.

When you tap the vote button on a product, its card expands to show you a description and a live preview of the product's website. A short countdown ensures you have time to actually check out the product before your vote is enabled. This way, every vote is informed and every product gets genuine attention from the community.

You can schedule your launch at any moment! A Free Launch typically has a waiting time of approximately one and a half months as it joins our global queue. If you want to launch sooner, our Premium Launch option places you in the immediate next tournament, which usually starts within 3 days.

Winners get massive exposure, a permanent badge on their product page, and a do-follow backlink. The champion of each tournament gets featured on our homepage and newsletter, which significantly improves your domain rating and overall site authority.

Traditional launch platforms like Product Hunt or Indie Hackers often place all products on a single global leaderboard, forcing projects in completely different niches to compete for the same top spots. We believe this is inherently unfair. RankInPublic organizes matchups based on specific niches and product categories, ensuring you compete against relevant peers rather than the entire market at once. This structure ensures that as the tournament progresses, the final rounds feature the highest-quality products from a diverse range of niches, offering a more balanced showcase of innovation.

During the bracket phase, our voting process uses a unique side-by-side matchup view. Two products are displayed together with their live websites or screenshots, allowing voters to instantly compare them without clicking through multiple pages. The winner is decided by the sum of all votes cast in that specific matchup, and they advance to the next round. In the qualifying round, voters browse a leaderboard and upvote individual products after viewing a live preview of each site, ensuring every entry gets genuine visibility.

Matchups are assigned based on product similarity using AI embeddings. This ensures fair competition by pairing similar products in the early rounds, while allowing for high-quality, diverse matchups as winners advance through the tournament, providing a more accurate reflection of your relative market position.

If a match ends with an equal number of votes, the tie-breaker is determined by the timing of the last vote. The product that received its most recent vote earlier (the 'older' last vote) is declared the winner, ensuring a deterministic and fair outcome.

Voters play a crucial role in discovering the best new projects. As a thank you for participating, voters receive exclusive discounts and special offers on some of the products they liked and voted for during the tournament process.