You asked about Advertising
10 people built something like it. 1 is gone.
That is 10% of the ones whose fate we could settle, against 23% across the whole register.
| Launched | What it was | Today |
|---|---|---|
| 2020-01-01 | YCTaiv AI-powered tech that makes business TV smarter, engaging, and… · taiv.tv | still up |
| 2025-09-01 | YCUplane Replace marketing agencies with AI · uplane.com | still up |
| 2022-01-01 | YCKular AI Lead Generator · kular.ai | still up |
| 2025-09-01 | YCAbsurd The Creative OS for AI video · absurd.com | still up |
| 2023-06-01 | Building the AI-powered marketing ops platform that turns website… · withsurface.com | still up |
| 2025-09-01 | YCLapis AI that creates and runs ads, end-end · trylapis.com | still up |
| 2022-01-01 | YCSprites The AI performance marketing agent for entrepreneurs and growth teams · sprites.ai | still up |
| 2017-06-01 | First agentic AI-powered community for 1 billion people with criminal… · commissary.club | gone |
| 2025-09-01 | AI agents on real phones, growing brands across every platform. · tellif.ai | still up |
| 2024-09-01 | YCStewdio All-in-one AI creative platform · stewdio.ai | still up |
How this compares
The register re-probes every domain it holds. Some that answered last month stop answering. We send that list — what went quiet, and what it was — once a month. Nothing else.
How this was made. Show HN entries are every post from 2021 to 2023 with at least five points that linked to its own domain; code hosts and free hosting are excluded, because a repository outlives the effort behind it. Product Hunt entries needed 100 votes — a far higher bar, so they are the promoted top slice rather than a like-for-like sample. Both are judged by asking the domain whether it still answers: gone means it no longer resolves, refuses the connection, serves a parking page, or says plainly that it shut down. An HTTP error is not counted as gone — a server answering 404 is one somebody still pays for, and an audit of 25 gone-calls found two such sites alive with only a moved homepage. Y Combinator entries use the status YC publishes itself, which is why only those can say acquired. Squatted domains — a lapsed name now serving somebody else's site — are not detected, so these figures run slightly low.