Attention is a market. I just made it liquid.

I built Kingpin as a live marketplace for attention: a vertical, infinite-scroll feed where founders pay to put their product in front of people, and the crowd decides in real time whether it deserves to stay there. A bid gets you in. Votes decide how long you last.

Because that’s a leaderboard, not a market — and leaderboards freeze. My first version of Kingpin worked exactly that way: highest bidder wins, decaying 5% a day. It was simple, and simple broke fast — whoever had the deepest pocket just sat at #1, and everyone else stopped bothering.

So I rebuilt position as a hybrid: your bid sets a baseline, and the confidence-weighted crowd vote shifts it up or down from there. A card the crowd hates bleeds rank even with money behind it — Sentiment_Steps ≤ −5 evicts it outright. A card the crowd loves can outrun a bigger bid. Refueling your position back up costs more every time you do it, so money alone can’t camp on top forever. That felt closer to how attention actually works.

I didn’t want a black-box ranking model or an engagement-maximizing feed deciding what people see. The inputs are a public bid amount and a public vote count, and the formula that turns them into a rank lives in one file, unchanged for every card. What you see is what moved it there — I can point to the exact line of code that did it, and so can you.

Everything above is the board and the feed: money and the crowd, in public. Kingpin Growth is a different product living under the same roof — a founder-side tool that searches Hacker News for people already talking about the problem your product solves, and drafts a reply with AI for you to review. It never posts anything on its own; you approve, edit, and post it yourself. See Pricing for how it’s sold, and the Rules for how it’s expected to be used.

I’m Suraj Mishra, and I built and run Kingpin myself — no team, no funding round. I’m posting the build as I go on X at @suraj__mishra__.

If you need to reach me — a takedown request, a billing question, a bug, or just feedback — email contact@kingpin.ltd or ping me on X. I read everything myself.