The Hall of Survivors as a build-in-public artefact

The Hall of Survivors is the part of BidSurvivor that outlives the ad. A slot lasts twelve hours; the record of who held it, what they paid and what it sent stays on a public board that anyone can open, sort, filter and link to. We built it as a leaderboard. It has turned out to be something more useful for the people who post their numbers in public: a dated record that somebody else keeps, on a page you did not write. This post describes exactly what it is, what it is not, and why a founder who already posts revenue screenshots might want one. It is ours, so weigh it accordingly.

What the Hall is, exactly

Three rolling boards, covering the last 7 days, the last 30 days and the last year. Each holds up to a hundred entries, ranked by the amount paid for the slot; you can re-sort by opens or by visits, and filter by category. A period cannot list more winners than it contains slots, so on a two-slot board the 7-day list can never hold more than fourteen names and the 30-day list more than sixty. The hundred only binds if the board grows.

Every entry shows the brand, the slot it held, and the price it cleared at. Opens — a card opened on the board — and click-throughs — somebody leaving for the brand's site — are counted separately and shown separately. Small numbers are shown as small numbers.

Two states appear on the board and they are labelled differently, because they are different things. A brand that takes the lead on a live slot appears in the Hall the moment it bids, marked as holding the slot now. It has not won anything yet; it can still be outbid before the slot closes, and if it is, it drops off and the new leader takes its place. A brand that holds a slot when its twelve hours end is fixed in the record as the brand that held it. That closed slot is permanent — nobody can buy history — and it is the only thing on the site that is.

The Hall itself is not permanent. It rolls. A win from last spring is on the year board until the year rolls past it, and after that it lives only on the brand's own page. Any description of the Hall as "forever" is wrong, and we have had to correct our own copy on this more than once.

Why a dated record is a build-in-public artefact

Build in public runs on screenshots. MRR charts, Stripe dashboards, a tweet with a number in it. They are persuasive because they are specific, and they are weak for the same reason: a screenshot is produced by the person it flatters, at the moment they chose, cropped as they liked. Nobody can check it.

The indie marketing guides circulating this month — buildinpublic.so is representative — recommend building in public as a channel precisely because an audience trusts a founder who shows working. The trouble is that "showing working" has drifted into "showing outcomes", and the marketing spend that produced the outcome almost never appears. The revenue is posted; the ad numbers that bought it are not.

A Hall entry is the opposite shape. It is a marketing number, not a revenue number. It was recorded by a third party, at a fixed time, under rules published in advance, and it sits next to everyone else's under the same rules. If you held the 12:00–24:00 slot on a Tuesday for $3.50 and it opened forty times and sent six people through, that is what the record says, and the person you are arguing with can go and look.

That is the whole value: not that the numbers are large — they are not, and we say so on the front page — but that they were not produced by you.

The two records: the board and the brand page

The Hall is a leaderboard and leaderboards forget. The thing you can actually cite is the brand page.

Every brand that has been on the board has a page of its own at /b/<id>. It lists every slot the brand has held, what each cost, and what each sent: opens, click-throughs, slots held. It has a title and an image for when the link is unfurled, and it is public. The side panel on the board is fine while you are looking at the board, but it cannot be linked to or sent to anyone. The brand page is that link, and "here is what our slot delivered, see for yourself" is the sentence it exists to support.

So the working pattern, if you post numbers, is: hold a slot, wait for it to close, and link the brand page rather than screenshotting the Hall. The screenshot ages. The page updates as more slots are held and keeps the earlier ones. A reader in six months sees the same record as a reader today, plus everything since.

We wrote down every rule of the board on one page so the terms the record was made under are also checkable. If the rules change, that page changes, with a date on it.

What a clearing price tells the next person

Prices on the Hall are real prices. Each entry shows what the slot cleared at, and because the first claim on an empty slot is free, a fair number of them show $0. That is fine, and it is information: a board where most winners paid nothing is a board where holding a slot was cheap, and the next brand can decide accordingly.

The history of ad markets is mostly a history of hiding this number. The clearing price of a slot on almost every platform is between you and the platform, and the platforms that do publish their numbers are rare enough to list. A public price is uncomfortable for a seller, which is presumably why it is rare, and it is the thing a buyer most wants before bidding.

For the founder building in public, a clearing price next to an open count is the ad-spend-to-attention screenshot nobody posts, produced automatically and kept by someone else.

What it is not

It is not a traffic guarantee. The board reaches whoever is looking at it, without targeting, and how many people that is on a given day is on the front page rather than in this paragraph, because the live number changes and a typed one goes stale.

It is not permanent, except for the closed slot's record. A brand's Hall entry drops off each board as the window rolls past it. The brand page keeps it.

It is not a vanity board you can buy your way to the top of and stay. Being outbid on a live slot takes you off the Hall immediately, and losing the slot does not refund the bid. The ranking by amount paid is honest in the same way an auction is honest: the number is what somebody was actually willing to pay.

And it is not neutral. It is on our site, about our slots, and we benefit if you find it useful. The mitigation is that everything on it is the kind of number a sceptic can check, including the ones that make the board look small.

The pixel page, again

We keep coming back to the Million Dollar Homepage, because it is the clearest case of a permanent record of advertising and what happens to one. Harvard's Library Innovation Lab found, a decade on, that roughly a fifth of its links went nowhere. The page kept its promise. The advertisers did not, and the record became a record of rot.

The Hall is the other way round. The ad is gone in twelve hours; nothing on the board is allowed to rot in place. What stays is a line in a ledger that says a named brand held a named slot on a named day, paid a stated amount, and got a counted number of opens and clicks. That is the artefact. It is small and it is checkable, and for someone who builds in public those are the two properties that matter.

If you want one, the credit every visitor starts with covers a first bid without a card, and an empty slot costs nothing at all.