For most of the last decade, launching a software product on a public board has meant the same exhausting ritual: pick a Tuesday, beg your network for upvotes between 7 a.m. and noon Pacific time, refresh the page until your eyes ache, and then watch the entire effort evaporate at midnight when the leaderboard resets. LaunchLoop was built, in part, as a protest against that ritual. The loop-shaped leaderboard is the most direct argument we make for a different model.
On LaunchLoop, the front page does not rank products by a single calendar day. Every launch lives inside a rolling window, and each upvote it receives carries a weight that decays gently as the days pass. A vote cast today counts the most. A vote cast a few days ago counts less. Past the end of the window, it is gone. The leaderboard you see at any given moment is a running sum of all of these decaying signals.
Why a rolling window?
Almost every founder we talked to before building this told some version of the same story: a frantic launch day, a brief sugar high of attention, and then a long, quiet slide into irrelevance, usually before they had even finished thanking the people who showed up. The day-one model rewards whoever has the largest pre-built audience and the most aggressive launch-day choreography. It punishes products that are genuinely useful but slow-burning.
A rolling window inverts that. It rewards traction that compounds. A product that gathers thoughtful upvotes day after day for a week ends up far ahead of one that gathers a wave in a single morning and nothing after. That is, we think, a better proxy for whether anyone is actually using the thing.
How the decay works
Each upvote is timestamped at the moment it is cast. When the leaderboard recomputes, each vote is multiplied by a decay factor based on its age. The curve is gentle at first and steeper toward the end of the window, so a launch does not lose half its score the moment it goes to bed. The math is intentionally boring; the goal was a curve that founders can explain to their own users in a single sentence.
What it means in practice
For supporters, almost nothing changes. You upvote a product you like; the system handles the rest. For founders, the day of the week you launch matters less, the size of your launch-day blast matters less, and the quality of the experience you ship matters more. Reaching the top of the loop on day four or five is not only possible, it is the design intent.
Boosts never change rankings
One last thing worth saying out loud: boosts bought with credits buy attention windows, not rank. The leaderboard is decided by votes only. Visibility can be paid for; standing cannot. That line is the one we are most committed to holding.