我像看股票走勢般追蹤新網域：提早發現新網站的方法

I still remember the night I found a tiny AI note-taking app three days after it launched. It was doing maybe 400 visits a day. Two months later it showed up on Product Hunt, did 40,000 visits in a day, and the comment section was full of people saying "how did I not know about this sooner."

I did know. I'd been using it for six weeks by then. I had emailed the founder a bug report, he'd replied within an hour, and I'd built a small workflow on top of his API before anyone else cared. That two-month head start was worth more than any "productivity hack" I'd tried that year — not because the app was magic, but because being early changes the relationship. Early users get answers. Early users get features. Early users get remembered.

The frustrating part? For every one I caught, I missed ten. And I kept missing them the same way: by waiting for launch platforms to tell me what was new.

Launch platforms tell you what's popular, not what's new

Product Hunt, Hacker News, the big newsletters — they're launch-day theater. By the time something trends there, the discovery arbitrage is gone. Thousands of people are already piling in, the founder is drowning in feedback, and your thoughtful comment is comment #482.

Don't get me wrong, I still browse them. But I stopped treating them as a discovery feed and started treating them as a confirmation feed: if a site I found three weeks ago shows up on the front page today, my system is working.

The real question is where to look before that happens. After a couple of years of experimenting, I landed on something embarrassingly simple: watch newly-registered domains, ranked by traffic velocity. Like a stock ticker, but for websites.

Two signals, that's it:

Newness — the domain was registered recently (weeks or a few months, not years). This filters out the entire established web.
Velocity — its traffic is surging right now. Not "big," surging. A site going from 50 to 5,000 daily visits is more interesting than a site sitting flat at 100,000.

Either signal alone is noise. New domains are mostly spam and parked pages. High-traffic sites are mostly old news. But a new domain with a steepening curve? That's a site that's alive — someone launched something, and the internet is starting to notice.

My 15-minute Friday routine

I do this once a week, Friday afternoon, coffee in hand. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes:

Step 1: Skim the surge board. I pull up a board that ranks newly-registered sites by traffic velocity and scan the top of the list. I'm not reading deeply — I'm pattern-matching. Which categories keep showing up? AI wrappers? Niche communities? Weird little tools?

Step 2: Filter by what I care about. Most weeks I'm hunting in two categories: dev tools and AI apps. If something in e-commerce or gaming spikes, I note it too — those categories have been quietly producing the most interesting launches lately.

Step 3: Open five, bookmark one. I open the five most interesting ones in tabs. Four get closed within a minute — broken, boring, or obviously a parked domain with bot traffic. One survives. That one gets bookmarked and a real try-out over the weekend.

Step 4: Reach out to one founder. This is the part most people skip, and it's the highest-leverage move. A short email — "hey, found your site early, here's a bug / here's what confused me / here's what I'd pay for" — to a founder with 500 daily users gets a reply roughly 80% of the time in my experience. Try that with a founder doing 50,000.

What to do with an early find

Finding sites early is only useful if you act on it. Three plays have consistently paid off for me:

Play 1: Give feedback, build on top. Early founders are starved for real users. A detailed bug report or a small integration built on their API buys you a relationship that money can't. Two of my freelance clients came from emails I sent to founders when their sites had under a thousand users.

Play 2: Write about it. A "first look" post about a site nobody's covered yet ranks almost by default — there's no competition for the keywords. Some of my best-performing posts were about tools with barely any search volume yet.

Play 3: Learn the pattern. After a few months of this, you start seeing repeats. The same landing-page structures, the same onboarding flows, the same distribution tricks. Watching new sites is market research disguised as procrastination.

The tool I built for this

I'll be honest about the ending here: I got tired of cobbling this together from domain-registration feeds and traffic estimators, so I built myself a board that does it — RainbowSea. It surfaces newly-registered websites currently surging in traffic, ranked by velocity, filterable by category. Basically the stock ticker I described above, running every day.

It's free, no signup. If you try the Friday routine, it's a decent starting point — and if you find something great three weeks before everyone else, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

Here's my question for you: what's the best website you discovered way before it blew up — and where did you find it? Drop it in the comments. I'm always looking to add new sources to the routine.