[marc]

For many years we explicitly denied any startup that was already launched.

This was back in the day where most startups had a long "pre-launch" phase where they would be collecting user feedback through private betas, etc before launching publicly.

I wanted BetaList to be focused on early-stage startups and to avoid a lot of debates about what is and isn't "early-stage" I decided on that clear policy.

We also denied startups for other reasons such as using an over-used homepage template (they never converted well for our audience as they'd see the same one multiple times a week) or simply having a dime-in-a-dozen product (which also didn't get many signups when featured on BetaList).