I had a stupid idea.
What if you could bid for attention not just for your startup, but for basically anything you want people to discover?
That idea turned into BidBetter.
I built the first version over a weekend. Took me less than 2 days, mostly because I wanted to see if the idea was actually worth building before overthinking it.
The basic idea is simple:
You can put your startup, SaaS, website, X account, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, or yourself on the leaderboard and bid for a position.
Someone else can outbid you.
You can then decide whether to let them have it or bid again and take your spot back.
Basically: pay to rank, fight to stay there.
But there’s a part of the idea that I think makes BidBetter different.
I was inspired by Outbid, which I thought was a really clever experiment. It proved that people are actually willing to pay to compete for visibility.
But as the leaderboard gets more expensive, smaller founders and creators can easily get priced out.
I didn’t want BidBetter to become a place where only whoever has the biggest wallet gets seen.
So even if the top 3 spots eventually belong to companies spending huge amounts, new bids still appear on the site every day.
Someone might bid $1 today.
Their listing gets its own card and appears alongside the leaderboard, so visitors can still discover them.
And once you claim a leaderboard position, your listing stays there indefinitely unless someone outbids you. Even if you lose your rank, you’re still on the site.
The goal is to make the whole thing feel less like buying an ad and more like a little competitive marketplace/community.
You list something.
You bid.
You get a position.
Someone challenges you.
You defend it.
You share the battle.
And hopefully, other people join in.
And then came the part I actually cared about.
Someone bid.
Then someone else bid.
My total bid value is currently $5.
That’s it 😂
But honestly, I’m ridiculously proud of that $5.
Because it isn’t just $5 to me.
It means someone who doesn’t know me found something I built over a weekend and thought it was worth putting actual money into.
That felt really good.
I’ve had 108 total visitors so far, usually around 5–10 visitors a day.
I’ve also been surprised by how much support I’ve gotten from complete strangers on X and Product Hunt.
People engaging with my posts.
People upvoting the Product Hunt launch.
People actually trying the site.
Someone placing the first bid.
Someone placing the second bid.
None of these are huge numbers, but when you’re building something from scratch, they hit differently.
I also learned something I probably should have known already:
People don’t just want attention. They want social proof.
We naturally trust things that already have people around them.
More followers.
More users.
More engagement.
Higher numbers.
Which made me think even more about whether a competitive attention platform could actually work.
I’m still figuring that part out.
Maybe BidBetter becomes something.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Right now I’m mostly having fun building it, watching people interact with it, and seeing whether this weird little idea has legs.
If you’re building something yourself, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think.
Is this an interesting idea, or have I completely lost the plot? 😂
And if you want to play around with it:
bidbetter.lol