How we decide a product is really gone

Domains have bad days. A redesign takes a site offline for a few hours. A payment lapses and gets renewed a week later. If we marked anything “gone” the moment it looked shaky, the catalog would be full of false alarms — products that are very much alive, just having a rough patch.

We’d rather be slow than wrong

So we don’t rush the call. A listing only moves to “Discontinued” once we’re genuinely confident it’s not coming back — never after one bad sign, never on a hunch. If a product recovers before we’re sure, it’s simply left alone: no flag, no note, nothing published.

The cost of being cautious is that some listings take longer to appear. We think that’s the right trade — a catalog people can actually trust is more useful than one that’s fast but wrong.

Why this matters for what you build next

Every idea generated here treats a listing as evidence that real people wanted something, and a real business didn’t make it. That evidence is only useful if it’s true. A catalog full of products that aren’t actually dead would be worse than no catalog at all — it would send you chasing openings that don’t exist.