How exit1.dev got its users
The product's own monitoring data becomes 299 /status/{domain} pages answering "is X down", with eight no-signup tools and a genuinely free tier as the way in.
Read from signals. Consistent with what is publicly observable, but nobody confirmed it. Check before you quote it.
You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.
- A traffic base that does not collapse when you stop publishing
- Acquisition that owes nothing to any social platform
- A proprietary or painful-to-assemble data source
- A template with a reason to exist page by page
- 6 to 12 months before it compounds
Programmatic SEO in 2026
Still alive, but the bar has moved. Thin pages get deindexed, so you need real data on every single page.
Everything on this channel →The play
5 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Find the public entities your product already touches and let the product generate the page, not a writer. exit1.dev monitors third-party services on its own homepage board (stripe.com, cloudflare.com, npmjs.com) and pipes that same live data into 299 /status/{domain} URLs, so adding a domain adds a page.
done whenYou can add a new entity to your list and a finished, non-empty page exists within minutes, with no writing step in between
- 2
Build one template that answers the search query in the first line and repeat it. Every /status/ page has H1 'anthropic.com status' and opens 'Is anthropic.com down? No', then 7/30/90-day uptime, a 52 ms response time, a 90-day bar, an outage log, a six-question FAQ and one 'Start Monitoring' button.
done whenSearch Console shows impressions on question-shaped queries you never wrote a post for, and clicks land on template pages rather than the homepage
- 3
Ship five to eight single-purpose free tools that work with no account, each closing on the paid version of the same job. exit1.dev runs /tools/ssl-checker, dns-checker, ping-test, redirect-checker and four more, all marked 'Free, no signup required' and ending with 'Stop checking manually'.
done whenTool pages pull their own entry traffic, and the signup button placed at the bottom of them gets clicks from sessions that started there
- 4
Write one comparison page per named competitor with real numbers, and cross-link them. exit1.dev has six under /compare/ that state '$24/mo for 1,000 monitors and 15-second checks' against 'UptimeRobot Team is $34/mo for 100 monitors at 60-second checks', each closing with a block linking to the other five.
done whenYou appear for '[competitor] alternative' searches, and your analytics show visitors moving from one comparison page to another through the cross-link block
- 5
Make the same facts readable by machines: publish llms.txt with the summary, feature URLs and plan prices, link it in the footer, and keep the pricing page public with no signup gate. exit1.dev does both, though its llms.txt quotes monthly prices ($4 / $9 / $24) while /pricing shows annual ($3 / $7 / $20), so keep the two in sync.
done whenAsking an AI assistant about your category returns your product with prices that match your pricing page, and your llms.txt returns HTTP 200
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
480 URLs in sitemap.xml, 299 of them /status/ pages; blog index reads "12 of 103 articles" with posts dated March 21 to July 7 2026; Discord invite labelled "61 builders"; public GitHub repo showing 14
What else they ran
Nothing else identified. One channel carried it.
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.