Launching in public, with the bumps.
A dated log of getting Metal Mantra in front of people: where we listed, what we paid for, what worked and what blocked us. Disclosure: Metal Mantra is a paid product. The first scan is free and re-audit passes are paid. We report what happened, not results: we do not publish traffic or revenue figures yet.
Going live
The project started under a working name and was renamed Metal Mantra on 6 October. On 7 October the site went live at metalmantra.io, self-hosted on a single small server. The positioning settled on a registry, not a marketplace: nothing is bought or sold through it, and a score is never presented as a certification.
The bug that taught us the most
While publishing the first reports we found that, for large repositories, the scanner read the first 80 files it met. In monorepos those were examples, so a framework was being judged by its demos. Files are now ranked source-first, and the report states how many files were eligible and how many were read.
Along the way the agent gate rejected many popular repositories as “not an agent”. That is the intended behaviour, but it showed us how narrow “an agent” is when you define it by code rather than by marketing.
Directories: free queues and paid launches
Product Hunt has no instant launch: the earliest slot we could schedule was 10 October. PeerPush quoted about two and a half months in its free queue, so we paid for its standard launch and the listing went live the same day. It is verified by a plain link back to its page from our footer.
The AI Agents Directory free tier also asks for its badge on our site, so it sits in the footer as well. We skipped one paid directory and are keeping the number of third-party links in the footer small. We have no conversion data yet, so we cannot say whether any of the paid options was worth it.
Social posts and developer registries
We posted a thread on X and a longer post on LinkedIn. X refused to prepare our demo video twice, so the thread has images and a link to the video instead. The server is also listed in the official MCP Registry as io.metalmantra/registry. Glama had already indexed it from there, and we claimed ownership with a file served at /.well-known/glama.json.
An article about the nine first reports went up on dev.to, with its AI-assistance disclosure ticked.
Making the site easier for AI answer engines to read
We added a FAQ to the home page, a JSON-LD graph describing the site and each report, a plain-text llms-full.txt with the method and report index, and pinged IndexNow. We have not measured an effect yet, and we do not know whether assistants will cite the registry more because of it.
What blocked us
Hacker News is temporarily restricting Show HN posts from new accounts, so a Show HN will wait until the account has taken part in the community. Indie Hackers lets new accounts create a product page but not publish posts until they have commented. Both are reasonable rules, and we would rather earn the right to post than work around them.