Launch Scout, Finding New Tech Launches for a Free Feature

The Hours Behind a Good Feature

A tech news site lives on fresh stories. The best ones are about companies nobody has written about yet. Finding them by hand means reading launch boards every morning, checking each company's site, finding a real contact, and writing a note. Say that is twenty minutes a company. Ten a week is most of a day.

Most of that time is spent on companies that turn out to be a poor fit. An old company launching a small feature. A site with no way to reach anyone. A launch that was a joke.

We wanted the searching and the sorting done before a person sits down, so the person spends their time on the choices that matter.

What We Built

Launch Scout is a small program at the edge. It reads public launch feeds and startup batch lists. For each new company, it visits the company's own website and looks for a contact address printed there. If the only address it can find is somewhere else, it drops the company. We only write to people who put their address on their own site.

Each company that passes is saved to a D1 database with its status. From there it waits in a review queue.

The offer is simple. A free feature article on T3CHS about their launch. If they want in, they fill out a short questionnaire. An editor turns the answers into a draft, reads it, and publishes it. The company gets a real story. The site gets fresh coverage and a new contact who asked to hear from us.

There is also a plain opt out page. Anyone who does not want to hear from us presses one button and is done.

How It Is Wired

The Worker does the fetching, filtering and saving. D1 holds the companies, their contacts and where each one stands. The questionnaire on the site forwards its answers to the Worker with a shared key, so random posts cannot fill the queue.

Outreach runs in review mode. The Worker can draft an invite, but it cannot send one. A person opens the admin screen, reads the list, and approves or skips each company. Only approved companies get a message. That rule is a setting in the code, and it is on.

Sending itself goes through the same CRM we use for everything else, with a real postal address in every email as the law requires. Until those pieces are in place, the scout is run by hand when we want a fresh list. The scheduling pattern is on the automation and scheduling page.

What Broke and What We Changed

Big Companies in a Feed for New Ones

Some launch boards list big, well known companies when they ship a new feature. A free feature for a new company makes sense. For a large one, it reads as odd. The review step catches these, and reviewers are told to skip them.

Addresses That Were Not Theirs

Addresses found on third party pages were often wrong or old, and some were not the company's at all. We narrowed the rule to addresses printed on the company's own domain. The list got shorter and much cleaner.

No Free Schedule Slot

The account's free plan has a small cap on scheduled jobs, and our other workers already use them. Rather than steal a slot from a job that matters more, the scout runs on demand until the plan changes. We wrote that down so nobody assumes it runs every hour.

What the Scout Deliberately Does Not Do

• It does not send without approval. A person approves every invite before it goes.
• It does not buy or scrape contact lists. It only uses addresses a company printed on its own site.
• It does not sell. The first message is a free feature offer, and the opt out works with one press.

Each of these limits makes the scout slower than it could be. That is the point. A tool that writes to strangers should be slow to press send and quick to stop. A cold message sent to the wrong person costs more than a week of missed invites, and it is the kind of mistake you cannot take back with a second email.

So the scout is built to find, sort and wait. The only thing it does fast is honor an opt out.

What It Means When You Switch It On

Your editor starts the morning with a short list of real new companies, each with a real contact, ready to approve or skip. The searching is done. The judgment stays with a person. And every company that says yes becomes a story and a contact who asked to hear from you.

If you run a trade site, a local guide or a news page of your own, the scout shape carries over. Point it at the places where new businesses announce themselves, keep the contact rule strict, and let a person approve every send. The list gets built while you sleep, and nothing goes out that you did not choose.

The same pattern works in any field where new businesses launch in public. Read how we keep automated jobs honest in the guide to scheduled jobs that run.