List Bulb 1.0: Going Live

May 21, 2026 was the day List Bulb stopped being a private build and became a public directory.

We were not trying to invent a new kind of internet. We wanted a hand-reviewed place for AI and SaaS products where founders could submit once, get a real product page, and show up next to peers—not in a spammy dump of every Chrome extension ever shipped.

What 1.0 actually shipped

Three things, on purpose:

1. Browse by category and tag — so discovery was structured, not only search-or-scroll.
2. Submit for editorial review — no instant auto-publish free-for-all.
3. Homepage discovery — new launches had a surface that was not buried three clicks down.

That was enough to start collecting real listings and learning which parts of the loop broke in production.

What we were optimizing for

Cold visitors comparing tools. Founders who would rather spend an hour on a good listing than a day on fifty nofollow forms. A product URL that could still matter after launch week noise died down.

We did not ship accounts, claims, or paid tiers on day one. That came later in List Bulb 2.0. The is the versioned record; this post is the story of the first live cut.