Today I shipped a small change in ShipFeed.
I noticed some people were creating product pages without publishing any article, mainly to get a public page and a backlink. The real issue was not just empty pages. Some of them were promoting things that do not belong in the kind of community I want to build: physical products, local services, and businesses unrelated to indie hacking, SaaS, developer tools, or digital products.
That is not what ShipFeed is for.
ShipFeed is meant for founders and teams sharing real product progress in public. Launches, feature updates, experiments, milestones, and lessons from building. The value should come from publishing real updates, not from creating a page just to capture SEO value.
So I changed the rule.
A product page now stays private until the product has at least one approved and published article. Until then, it does not appear in the sitemap, it is not visible to random visitors, and only logged-in users with access to that product can see it.
I also added a banner in the dashboard and product page to explain why the page is still private and encourage the owner to publish their first post.
I want public visibility in ShipFeed to come from contribution. A product page should mean there is something real behind it.