Time for a confession with a row count. Somewhere in my Google Drive lives a spreadsheet I have been maintaining for more than ten years. It has over two hundred and fifty rows, one per tool, and four columns that never change: what it does, which category it belongs to, the rating I gave it, and the link to go there. It is one of the most valuable documents I own, I consult it weekly, and it is, objectively, a horror. No previews, no search worth the name, no way to show a client without apologizing for it first. A friend of mine does the same thing in a PDF he regenerates by hand. Everyone I know in this trade does it somewhere, in browser bookmarks collapsing under their own weight, a Notion page abandoned at forty entries, or a text file called tools-NEW-v3.
The need is so real that an entire artisanal culture grew around its public half. Developers hand-build “/uses” pages, personal pages listing the tools they swear by, and uses.tech collects hundreds of them, every single one coded by hand. Think about what that means. The demand is so strong that people write HTML for it. The directory is a list, not a product. Nobody has turned the private spreadsheet into that public page automatically. My spreadsheet is the private half of the same instinct, bricolage on the other side of the same missing product.
Stackpage is that product. A private library for the tools of your trade, structured the way my spreadsheet always wanted to be. Capture a URL and the entry builds itself (name, logo, description fetched), then you add the category, your rating, and the one line that actually matters, why I use it. Search that works. And then, the second half, one click turns your library, or the slice of it you choose, into a public page. Clean, fast, categorized, yours, stackpage.com/you or your own domain. The private workbench generates the public storefront.
Library first, page second: the lesson of a dead startup
The graveyard around this idea is instructive, and one grave more than the others. Kit.co built exactly the public half, beautiful recommendation pages for creators’ gear, and shut down in May 2026. I take one lesson from it. A page that exists only to recommend is a chore you update twice and abandon, because it serves your audience, not you. The order has to be reversed. Stackpage is a tool you keep open for yourself, the place you check on Monday for that invoicing app you starred in March, and the public page is a free byproduct of a library you were maintaining anyway.
Self-interest keeps the data fresh; the audience gets the overflow.
The rest of the graveyard confirms the gap from the other side. Raindrop and its public collections are the closest living neighbor, and they share a folder, not an identity. No ratings, no voice, no “here is my stack,” just links in a box. Start.me and Toby organize private dashboards and never grow a public face worth linking. StackShare does public stacks, but for companies and engineering org charts, cold as an RFP. And the /uses pages themselves are lovely and frozen, hand-coded, rarely updated, unsearchable as a set. Between the folder, the dashboard, the org chart, and the artisanal HTML, there is a person-shaped hole: the professional whose taste in tools is part of their professional identity.
Key Features
- Capture in five seconds. Paste a URL, get a filled entry: name, favicon, description, and a preview image if the site offers one. You add category, rating, and the one-liner. Anything slower than my spreadsheet loses to my spreadsheet.
- Import that eats your history. Browser bookmarks, a CSV, a Google Sheet with ten years of seniority: day one must ingest the bricolage this product replaces. I have two hundred and fifty rows that demand it.
- The why-line. The single highest-value field in the product. “Fast invoicing, French tax rules handled” tells a visitor more than any star rating. Ratings sort; reasons convince.
- Private by default, public by selection. The library is a workbench, not a performance. You choose which categories and which entries surface on the page, and the page auto-updates as the library lives.
- A page worth being your link. Typographically clean, categorized, searchable, with your name and one paragraph of you. The kind of page you put in a proposal footer, a conference bio, an email signature.
- Rot detection. Tools die constantly. Stackpage pings your links, flags the dead and the acquired, and nudges you to prune, which solves the moment every hand-made /uses page silently gave up.
- The directory. Every public stackpage can opt into the shared index: browse stacks by trade, find what other freelance designers or SEO consultants actually pay for. The hand-built culture proved people want this; the directory is where the network effect lives.
The honest tensions
The Notion question first, because it is the killer objection. Could this not be a template? For the private half, yes, roughly, minus the capture speed, the previews, and the rot detection. What a template cannot produce is the public format, a standard, recognizable, beautiful stack page at a stable URL, or the directory that makes those pages discoverable as a set. The hand-coded /uses culture is the proof. Those people all have Notion, and they wrote HTML anyway, because they wanted a page, not a document. The product is the format plus the network; the library is how you earn the right to generate it.
The adjacency is crowded and the differentiation is thin on any single axis. It only holds as the specific bundle, workbench plus identity plus directory, aimed at the specific person, the web professional whose toolbox is part of their reputation. That is a niche, not a landgrab, and the economics below are sized accordingly.
And affiliation, the obvious revenue, is also the obvious corruption risk. The moment ratings feel bought, every page on the platform is worthless. The line has to be structural. Affiliate links are auto-applied by the platform where programs exist, clearly labeled, revenue shared with the page owner, and never, ever, connected to ranking, rating, or visibility. You recommend what you recommend; if money follows, it follows disclosed and downstream.
Monetization
Free tier generous enough to live in: full private library, public page on the shared domain. Pro for the professionals the product serves: custom domain, branding, page analytics, multiple stacks (one per service line, one per client type). And the affiliation layer as described, platform-brokered, labeled, revenue-shared, which has the elegant property of paying the people who maintain honest, current, useful pages, since dead links earn nothing.
Next Steps: How I’d Build It
The MVP has a name and it is sitting in my Drive. The day Stackpage can import my ten-year spreadsheet and render it as a page I would genuinely send to a client, the concept is validated by its harshest available critic. Capture, import, categories, ratings, the why-line, one clean public template. No directory yet, no affiliation yet.
Then fifty hand-picked web professionals, the kind who already keep a sheet or a dead /uses page, invited personally, their imports assisted if needed, because fifty real stacks make the directory worth opening and the format worth copying. The affiliation layer comes last, once there are pages worth monetizing and a reputation worth protecting.
Closing
Stackpage is the spreadsheet every web professional secretly maintains, given capture, previews, a search, a public face, and a neighborhood. Mine has two hundred and fifty rows and a decade of seniority, and it deserves better than cell A1.
If you build this, tell me, and I will be your first import: ten years of tools, rated, categorized, reasons included. Consider that both an offer and a warning about my standards for the CSV parser.
