How AI assistants, autonomous agents and developers can search, read and cite startups, products and founders listed on Founder.best.
Founder.best is a weekly launch and discovery platform for indie founders and SaaS makers. Every product a founder submits gets a permanent page with its tagline, description, categories, use cases, target audiences, pricing model, platforms, links and community signals. This documentation covers the layer that makes all of that usable by machines: a JSON API, an MCP server, Markdown mirrors, llms.txt and schema.org structured data.
The REST API and the MCP server call the same query functions, so results never depend on which transport you arrived through. Pick MCP if you are working inside Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or another agent host. Pick REST if you are writing a script, a backend or a custom tool.
Everything is anonymous and read-only. An agent can search the catalogue with natural language and structured filters, pull the full record for any product, look up founders and the products they launched, read the ranked launches for any week (the weekly winners), list what is trending, and discover the taxonomy it can filter on. Every result links back to the canonical Founder.best page and to the product’s own website, so the agent can cite its sources.
There are no write tools.
Nothing in this API or MCP server can create, edit, upvote, comment on or submit a product. Launching on Founder.best is done by a signed-in founder at /submit, and free launches are reviewed by an admin before they go live. That boundary is deliberate: it keeps the discovery surface safe to expose without authentication.
The API also never returns anything that is not already visible on a public page: no email addresses, no billing or subscription data, no internal database IDs, no dashboard analytics, and no products that are pending, rejected or still waiting for a launch date. See Privacy & data policy.
| Surface | URL |
|---|---|
| MCP server (Streamable HTTP) | https://www.founder.best/api/mcp |
| REST base | https://www.founder.best/api/v1 |
| API discovery document | https://www.founder.best/api/v1 |
| OpenAPI 3.1 | https://www.founder.best/api/v1/openapi.json |
| llms.txt | https://www.founder.best/llms.txt |
| Full catalogue | https://www.founder.best/llms-full.txt |
| Product as Markdown | https://www.founder.best/products/{slug}.md |
| Founder as Markdown | https://www.founder.best/founders/{username}.md |
When you pass a free-text query, Founder.best tokenises it, drops filler words, lightly stems each term (so generate also matches generator), and collects candidates whose name, tagline or description contain a term, or that are tagged with a matching use case, target audience or category. Candidates are then scored - name matches count most, then tagline, then tags, then description, with a bonus when every term matches and a small tie-breaker for upvotes. Without a query, results are ordered by community upvotes unless you ask for newest, oldest or rating.
Email support@founder.best. Include your User-Agent or the generated_at value from a response if you are reporting an incorrect result.