Build-in-public note, no fireworks.
Why bother
Search Console in mid-August was blunt: 6 of 1,098 pages indexed, the rest stuck at "Discovered – currently not indexed", and the Links report empty. Zero external backlinks. The site has a thousand free session pages that nobody can find because nothing points at them. Directories are the cheapest way to get the first handful of pointers, and they are also the corpora that AI assistants read when someone asks "what tools show SPX gamma exposure". So the goal was never traffic. It was (a) backlinks and (b) third-party mentions.
What went in
The same card everywhere: SPX dealer positioning rebuilt from the 0DTE tape; zero-gamma flip, call/put walls, hold band; every finished session free; a backtest Lab; an MCP server; no buy/sell signals. Logo from the favicon, three screenshots (terminal, the measured book, the Lab), category Finance / Investing wherever the menu allowed it.
Done and live: Capterra, AlternativeTo, the official MCP registry (and glama.ai, which pulls from it), TradersList, Firsto, TinyLaunch, Startup Fame, Indie Hackers. Submitted and waiting on a human: StartupStash. Product Hunt is scheduled, one shot only.
What we skipped, and why — this is the useful part
- Anything that wants a badge on our homepage for the free tier (Huzzler, Startup Fame's final step). The card is filled and sits unpublished. A measurement terminal with "featured on" stickers on it is a different product.
- AI-tool directories (Futurepedia, There's An AI For That). $300–$500 for a listing in front of an audience that wants image generators. The MCP server technically qualifies; the economics do not.
- Hashnode. Published a 1,300-word engineering write-up; AutoMod archived it within the hour as "this type of content" on a free subdomain, with an upsell to Pro. The Markdown is saved; it will go out on dev.to instead.
- Reddit. Not a channel for this product. Decided, not deferred.
- Paid "we submit you to 140 directories" packages. Every one of those directories is on the list above or is a badge farm.
What it actually produced
Honest answer: a dozen dofollow links and a dozen places where the phrase "measured, not assumed" now exists outside our own domain. Indexing has not moved yet — it will not for weeks, if it moves at all. The one thing that changed immediately is that asking an AI assistant about SPX dealer-gamma tools now sometimes returns gex.live, because the MCP registry listing is exactly the kind of page those models read.
The rule we kept
Never write "accurate" about the signing. Internal measurement against Cboe trade-level truth puts simple tape-based signing near a coin flip on 0DTE, and a directory whose stated filter is "no dishonest offerings" will check. Every listing says measured rather than assumed, which is true, and links to the free archive so anyone can verify it.
https://gex.live — the archive is at /sessions, no account needed.
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