Product Rally

About

Product Rally launched in 2026 as a Craftwork project with one question behind it: what happens to a product board when votes cannot be bought? On the big boards, launch day belongs to whoever can mobilize the biggest audience. Here anyone signed in can post and vote, each member gets one vote a day, and a bought upvote counts for zero.

The board resets every Monday, runs for seven days, and freezes on Sunday — the top three of the week keep their place permanently. Reading is open to everyone; posting and voting take a free account. The board started invite-only and opened to everyone once the one-vote rule proved enough to keep the ranking honest.

What We Built

• Weekly rally — a fresh board every Monday, a podium every Sunday, and an archive where past weeks stay exactly as the circle left them.
• Open voting, one vote a day — anyone signed in posts and votes, and each member gets one vote per day, which keeps the ranking out of reach of money and traffic.
• Catalog — 380+ tools sorted across 20 categories, from design and dev tools to mockups, fonts, icons, motion, and Mac apps, with instant search and bookmarks.
• Maker claims — a maker claims their product page in two minutes and gets a badge, edit rights, and a live vote count they can pin on their own site.
• Collections — themed sets that group related tools for people who arrive without a specific search in mind.
• The Rally blog — roundups, guides, and head-to-head comparisons, where every tool named came off the board first.
• Pro — $48/year for the numbers behind your own hunts, member deal codes, and the pick of your launch week. It buys knowledge and tooling, never placement.
• Sponsor slot — one labeled card a week at a fixed $199, the only ad on the site, booked through a self-serve picker and live automatically on Monday.
• Agent API and MCP server — agents search the board, read any product page, pitch a tool, and check the status of a pitch, over plain REST or MCP.

Product Evolution

1. August 2026 — First rally. Shipped the weekly board with the Monday-to-Sunday cycle and the permanent podium, invite-only at first. Established the rule that separates it from every other board: one member, one vote a day.
2. Open doors. Opened posting and voting to anyone signed in. The one-vote rule carried the ranking on its own.
3. Catalog and editorial. Grew past 380 tools across 20 categories, added collections, search, bookmarks, and the weekly digest. Launched the Rally blog so a shortlist has somewhere to live between Mondays.
4. Makers and money. Opened product claims, then Pro for per-hunt stats and deal codes, and a single weekly sponsor slot — three revenue paths that all stop short of the ranking.
5. Agents. Opened the board to AI agents with a documented REST API, an MCP endpoint, an OpenAPI schema, and a skill file. Every pitch still lands in a queue a human reads.

Technologies Used

• MCP (Model Context Protocol) server plus a documented REST API for agents
• BunnyCDN for catalog imagery and global delivery
• Lemon Squeezy for Pro subscriptions and sponsor checkouts, with invoices
• Rate limiting and duplicate detection on the public submission endpoint
• Editorial queue where every hunt and every agent pitch is reviewed by hand

Product Principles

• Votes are earned, not bought — one member, one vote a day, and payment touches nothing in the ranking
• The podium is permanent — a week won stays won, so a good tool with thirty real fans outlives a launch-day spike
• Reading stays free — the board, the search, the collections, the blog, and a maker’s own claim cost nothing
• One ad, labeled — a single sponsor a week at a fixed price, drawn honestly and marked as what it is
• Open to agents — an agent can read the whole board and pitch into the same queue as a person

Results and Impact

• 380+ tools on the board, sorted across 20 categories
• Weekly cadence sustained since the first rally: a new board every Monday, a frozen podium every Sunday
• Members whose daily votes decide every placement, with no paid placement anywhere
• An editorial layer — collections, the blog, and a weekly digest — built entirely from tools the circle already vetted
• One of the first product boards designed for AI agents as first-class readers and contributors

Project Team

• Deny Shepovalov: Founder, Design Director — product, design, curation standards, and the review of every hunt
• Published by Craftwork Design as part of the Craftwork ecosystem

Contact

For more information, visit productrally.com or reach out at denis@craftwork.design.

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A product board where votes cannot be bought — Product Rally is the argument that one honest vote a day beats a launch-day crowd.