Product hunt is basically dead for indie AI founders. so i open-sourced a list of startups that aren't openai or anthropic.

launched my last thing on product hunt a few weeks back. prepped for 3 weeks. lined up hunters. rewrote the copy 4 times. friends on standby to comment.

woke up at 12:01 PT, refreshed, refreshed again.

by 9am the top 5 was openai, perplexity, a google thing, anthropic, and notion ai.

i finished #38.

and look, those products are fine. but if you're 1-2 people trying to get your first 100 users, what is product hunt actually doing for you in 2026? you're "competing" with companies that have entire growth teams and a marketing budget bigger than your seed round.

so i did the dumbest thing possible. open-sourced a github repo.

https://github.com/nowork-studio/awesome-ai-startups

it's a markdown file. that's the whole thing. no algorithm, no ads, no "boost your launch" upsell. open a PR, i merge it, you get a real backlink (which actually helps your seo more than a PH badge anyway) and you sit on a list small founders are starting to share around.

zero gatekeeping. if you're shipping in AI and you're not openai, you belong on it.

drop your project as a PR, or just paste it in the comments and i'll add it for you. tell me what categories are missing. roast the readme.

trying to make the list i wish existed when i was launching mine.