The idea
What it is
The problem
A founder recording a launch video on Monday wants to see how 3 good demos open. They remember one from X last month, scroll their bookmarks for 20 minutes, and give up. The video they record that afternoon copies the only reference they can find: their own last launch.
X bookmarks do not sort demos by what they were made for. A pre-launch teaser and a funding announcement look the same in search results.
The product
Pick a demo format: a launch, a feature update, a teaser. The library shows the best demos of that format posted on X, each with a short note on why it works. Open the original post and borrow the opening, the pacing or the hook.
Three things set it apart from scrolling X bookmarks.
- Sorted by the job the demo is doing: pre-launch teaser, launch, feature update, funding announcement or customer story, then by product type
- A why-it-works note on every entry, so you learn the move, not just see the video
- Picked by a person, a new demo every day, with a link to the original post
The weekend version: one page of 40 demos from X, tagged by format, each with a 2-line note.
Who pays
- Buyer
- A founder the week before a launch who wants 5 real references before they open the recording tool.
- Price
- Starting point: $19 per demo a founder submits, with browsing free; directory listings run from a $3 basic listing here to a $29 featured spot.
- Also pays
- Demo recording tools such as Matte ($10 a month) and ShotGlass ($29 once), for a $99 weekly featured slot that 10 Matte subscribers would pay back.
Why now
Best Designs on X showed that a gallery of the best work posted there is worth visiting regularly. Nobody does the same for product demos. Recording a polished demo also got cheap: Matte's free version records, frames and exports 4K demos with a small watermark.
How to validate it
- Collect 40 product demos from X in one week and publish them on one page, tagged by format. Pass: 1 or more founders you have never met submit a demo or share the page within 7 days.
- Ask 10 founders who launched in the last 3 months how long they looked for demo examples before recording. Pass: 6 or more say over an hour, or that they gave up.
- Offer Matte, ShotGlass and one other recording tool the weekly featured slot as a paid 2-week trial. Pass: 1 or more of the 3 pays.
- Post the library to Hacker News as a Show HN. Pass: it reaches the front page or gets 20 or more comments within 24 hours.
- Run the library for 4 weeks with analytics on. Pass: 20% or more of visitors come back within 2 weeks.
Examples like this
The Wicked Swipe FileMarketing An email-gated library of 4,600+ ad references, the swipe-file format applied to ads 
Ad Swipe FileMarketing A free library of 22,000+ ads with AI search and filters by niche 
before.clickDesign A curated gallery of real App Store screenshots with guidance for builders making their own 
MatteVideo A Mac studio for polished app demos, the kind of sponsor this library sells its weekly slot to Tools to build it
DirectifyFeaturedno code Builds the library with filters, submissions and paid featured listings Visit 
