Product Hunter

What the surface does

The hunter serves a feed of candidate products, each carrying the dated evidence that put it there. You may pass on one, hold one while you decide, or claim one. A claim is permanent and exclusive: the product leaves every other founder’s feed, and it is yours from that point.

The three legs

Every candidate is scored on three axes, and each axis has to stand on its own dated sources rather than on an aggregate:

• Urgency — is there a reason to buy this now rather than later.
• Scarcity — is supply constrained in a way a buyer can feel.
• Feasibility — can this actually be sourced, shipped and sold.

A product below the floor on any leg ranks last; it is not silently removed. The age of a find is the age of its weakest leg: for each leg the engine takes its freshest source, then takes the oldest of those. A find is only as current as its most neglected axis. Evidence younger than ninety days counts at full strength and decays towards a floor at one year, so the engine downgrades its own confidence as its inputs go quiet rather than waiting to be corrected.

Claim, hold and exclusivity

A hold is a thirty-minute reservation while you decide. Several founders may watch the same unclaimed product at once — a hold is not a global lock — but only one claim can ever exist. Exclusivity is enforced by a unique index on the product in the claims database rather than by application logic, because the same bug reopened twice when two code paths were allowed to answer the same question.

Exclusivity applies to a look, not only to a purchase: a product under someone else’s claim or hold is not shown to you as available, so you never form an attachment to inventory you cannot have. One walkthrough product is deliberately shared, so that a first-time visitor can complete the journey without consuming real inventory.

What an operator sees

A card per product with its photograph, its identifying specification, and the evidence rows behind each leg — claim, source URL and date. Before any control that cannot be undone, the consequence is stated: passing a product tells you plainly that you will not see it again, and moving your hold tells you the previous hold is released. A control whose consequence is discovered after the click is a trap, and in an exclusive inventory several of these are genuinely irreversible.

The same engine runs against a product you name yourself. The analyse tool returns the same three-leg reading and the same evidence rows for a product you already sell.

Honest limits

• The inventory is finite. When servable stock runs low the surface says so rather than implying the engine has stopped working, because a quiet feed and an exhausted feed are two meanings on one signal.
• A product with no real photograph is not served. The company logo is not a product photo, and a placeholder standing in for one is a fabrication.
• A product with no specification precise enough to distinguish it from its neighbours is withheld, because any price we matched against it might belong to a different product.
• Evidence is retrieved, not predicted. Where a source will not answer, the find says so and names retrieval as our failure, not the market’s.

The next stage prices what you claimed: see supplier for how the offer is assembled, or research for how the engine is scored against alternatives.