Antonio Escudero started RankInPublic from the same frustration many indie founders feel after a launch: a short burst of attention on launch day, then silence. Product Hunt and similar platforms could create a spike, but the value faded quickly and often rewarded whoever had the biggest network or the deepest launch-agency budget. Antonio wanted a more durable way for small SaaS teams to earn visibility, feedback and backlinks.

RankInPublic became a tournament-style launch platform. Founders submit a product, get matched against similar products in weekly one-on-one competitions, and ask their own audience to vote. That structure turned promotion into part of the product: each participant had a reason to share the matchup, while RankInPublic earned fresh traffic, product listings, testimonials and permanent SEO pages. The official site now describes the platform as a place for startups to compete for visibility, backlinks and growth, with real votes instead of bots or pay-to-win launch mechanics.

The free tournament alone was not the whole business. The stronger monetization came from the directory submission service built beside it. RankInPublic manually submits startups to more than 140 curated directories, saving founders days of work and giving them a concrete SEO outcome. The public service page shows customer examples with domain-rating jumps and testimonials, while the affiliate page confirms paid products and commissions tied to the directory service.

MRR Story reports that Antonio's first paying customer came about two months after starting, when someone paid to sponsor a weekly tournament. Growth accelerated when he stopped treating the tournaments as the only offer and began selling the higher-ticket directory service directly. By April 2026 the business was reported at $13.5k for the month, with current recurring revenue described as roughly $17k to $20k MRR. I use the lower bound for the structured current-revenue field and leave the exact path to $10k MRR out of the milestone data because the public source does not give a precise start date or threshold-crossing date.

The lesson is not that every founder should copy launch tournaments. It is that Antonio attached a paid, outcome-specific service to a free product that already attracted the exact customer. The tournament created distribution and trust; the directory service captured demand from founders who wanted backlinks without doing the repetitive work themselves.