I created a simple experiment around this one question: what would happen if a product’s visibility was made 100% transparent?
This is what I do, I spend a lot of my time writing software.
AI: systems of questionable competence LLMs: random applications. All the way from full-stack products. Of course all of these can (and will) be disproved by a simple intuitive experiment.
It is usually the building part that is the easy part to understand.
There is a repo. There are features to be shipped. There are bugs to fix. There is always another endpoint, another model, another UI enhancement.
Then you launch.
And suddenly the problem changes.
You might have a working product, a decent landing page, and even something you really find interesting. And still, you don’t know how to get people to find it.
That’s the bit about building products that I find strangely hard.
This is a product that can be real, yet invisible
Buy a way to sell your product.
You can build an audience.
You can post on social media.
You can submit to communities and directories.
You can work on SEO.
You can run ads.
You may be able to get picked up by someone with a bigger audience than you.
None of these are inherently bad.
The trouble is that for most of these admissions, they raise a second question:
What made this product stand out and become popular?
Sometimes the answer is obvious.
Occasionally, it’s just about the audience size of somebody.
Sometimes it is timing.
Varying Quality Sometimes It Is the Product.
And sometimes there’s a ranking or prioritization mechanism between you and that target.
It’s especially interesting to me personally as an AI builder.
Contemporary recommendation systems are very complex. Open source recommendation stacks like X’s demonstrate how complex they can be: there’s candidate retrieval, filtering, scoring, ranking, reranking, and sometimes even visibility decision, all happening before something is presented to a user.
That complexity can be useful.
It can also make it hard to figure out what the result will be without.
I started wondering about the opposite.
What if ranking was deliberately simple?
Not better.
Not smarter.
Just completely obvious.
So I made ranking a price
And so that question became what might be a small experiment, called Get-Seen. Live.
The idea is deliberately straightforward:
Your rank is what you pay.
There are no votes.
No followers.
No hunters.
No review queue.
No complex ranking algorithm to determine if your product ranks #3.
You provide a product website or an X handle, select a category, choose a amount, and pay.
That contribution, in turn, is what positions the list on the public scoreboard.
The highest cumulative amount holds #1.
To become #1 it needs $11, if it is now #1 with a $10 claim.
If you refuse to give #1, you can still rank lower.
Or if you return at a later date, then you can upgrade your existing listing by making the payment difference.
That is basically the entire idea.
It was my aim to keep the mechanism as simple as possible that when you look at the leaderboard you can instantly see why one product is ranked above another.
No guessing.
No lying that the ranking is weighted on some fake “quality.”
The rank is public because the mechanism is.
There is something quite compelling about making the rules this explicit
The majority of us have been trained to accept rankings as long as there is some complexity to them.
The social feed may look at numerous signals.
A search engine holds its own ranking algorithms.
Some directories have editorial policies, voting, sponsorships or all three.
Paid advertisement is honest about being paid, but it’s a distinct paid option from the organic results surrounding it.
Get-Seen. Live takes a much narrower approach.
It does not attempt to determine that one product is better than another.
It makes no claims for the #1 product, specifically that it is the best product on the internet.
It simply says:
This is what has been paid for this post.
That distinction matters.
A leaderboard can be subjective.
A payment amount is observable.
But that raises an altogether different problem
We can clearly see a flaw in this concept.
Why doesn’t the leaderboard turn into a merit market?
Honestly, I think that is a good question.
No amount of money can make a product even good if its quantity has been bought for a higher position.
It does not guarantee users.
It does not guarantee clicks.
It does not guarantee customers.
It does not guarantee sales.
And I refuse to do the bashers’ work by suggesting otherwise.
What is up for buy is a seat on the table.
What occurs after an individual views that position relies on the product.
That was kinda the point of why I built it actually.
I am more curious about the mechanism than an giả định that I’ve already fixed distribution.
I also wanted the economics to be visible …
For the duration of the Launch, claims are set at $1.
But that doesn’t mean the price will stay there.
This system is based on the premise that the price of a rank can go up as people try to shoot for it.
There are three boards:
All-time — the permanent leaderboard.
Today — as of there being spent since the UTC midnight.
Daily — the archived daily boards.
One payment may apply to the applicable boards.
There’s also a slightly fun mechanic going on behind the scenes with #1: the crown premium.
If someone has a lead, one has to pay out $1 more than the leader to get the crown.
What I like about this mechanic is that the players see the competition.
You will no longer have to guess what “the algorithm” desires.
Precisely, you can visualize how much higher you should go.
The strangest part is how simple the idea feels
I have been using complex software for years.
LLMs.
RAG pipelines.
Real-time voice systems.
Distributed backends.
Agent orchestration.
That’s quite refreshing, developing a product with a core logic you can describe in one sentence.
Pay more. Rank higher.
And of course, the simplicity also exposes all of the weaknesses.
A transparent ranking system cannot remain hidden behind complexity.
The blame for a cryptic algorithm can’t be pointed anywhere.
And if nobody is interested on the leaderboard, that is displayed.
Yet if the race is for positions, this one’s obvious as well.
We shall know how to learn if the idea is any good. We shall know by the behaviour.
If it is largely builders paying other builders for some bits of pixels of attention that will also be revealed.
I would rather know.
I don’t believe this feature is necessary for all products
I also don’t think Get-Seen. Live is a one size fits all alternative for product launches, SEO, communities, content marketing or advertising.
It is a very specific experiment.
Where Do I Need My Product To Be? For the individual who has a product and is thinking:
“I created the thing. How do I get it in front of anyone?”
I didn’t want to answer that question with another complex system; I wanted to take a shot at an especially plainspoken one.
Buy a rank.
See what happens.
That is it.
Maybe the interesting thing is larger than the product
What I am most eager to learn has little to do with the leaderboard.
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