Where to submit your startup

The directories and launch platforms worth submitting an indie product to, what each one is for, and how to work through them without losing a weekend.

You shipped something. The next question is where to put it so that somebody other than your group chat finds out, and the honest answer is that there is no single place — there is a list of about twenty, they are worth wildly different amounts, and most guides to them are affiliate pages that rank the ones paying the most.

This is the list without that. It is written by people who run a directory, so read the last section with that in mind.

What you are actually buying

Three different things get called "submitting your startup", and confusing them is why the exercise feels like it does nothing.

  • A launch. One day of concentrated attention on a platform whose audience shows up for launches. Product Hunt is the archetype. It is an event, it mostly does not repeat, and it rewards preparation more than it rewards the product.
  • A listing. A permanent page about your product on somebody else's domain, usually with a link back to yours. No spike, no event. It works quietly, for as long as the page exists, and it is the reason directories are worth bothering with at all.
  • A mention. A line in somebody's roundup or newsletter. Unpredictable, and not something you submit to so much as earn.

The first is a day of work for a day of traffic. The second is ten minutes for a page that keeps working. If you have one afternoon, spend it on listings.

The launch platforms

  • Product Hunt — still the largest audience, and still the most work. Worth doing once, properly, when you have something finished and a handful of people who will actually show up.
  • Hacker News — Show HN is free, instant, and unforgiving. A plain title, a comment explaining what you built and why, and no marketing voice at all.
  • BetaList — for products that are not finished yet, which is a category almost nothing else serves.
  • Indie Hackers — a post, not a listing. It is a place to write about the building, and the product travels with the writing.
  • Uneed, Fazier, MicroLaunch and DevHunt are the smaller launch boards. Each is ten minutes, each sends a smaller and more specific audience than Product Hunt, and collectively they are worth more than a second Product Hunt attempt.
  • SaaSHub — a comparison site rather than a launch board. Being listed there means turning up next to your competitors, which is where somebody comparing tools already is.

The directories, and the lists of directories

The fastest way to find directories is to find the people who maintain lists of them. These are the ones that are kept current rather than published once:

How to actually get through them

The work is repetitive, so do it once and reuse it.

  1. Write your fields once, in a file: product name, a one-line description under twelve words, a longer paragraph, three to five tags, your logo as a square PNG, a screenshot, your X and LinkedIn URLs, and a founder bio in two sentences. Nearly every form on the internet asks for that set.
  2. Check your own site first. Half of these will pull your title, description and social card automatically, and a missing og:image is why your listing looks broken on a site you cannot edit.
  3. Submit five to ten a week rather than forty in one sitting. A backlink profile that appears over a month reads as a product being adopted; the same links appearing in one afternoon reads as what it is.
  4. Keep a list of where you submitted and what came back. Half of these are moderated by one person, and a polite follow-up two weeks later is often the difference between listed and forgotten.
  5. Skip anything that wants a link back before it will list you, or money before it will look at you. Reciprocal-link requirements are the oldest way to be classified as a link scheme, and it is your domain that carries the cost.

What to expect from it

Direct traffic from any single directory is small. A few visitors a week from a good one, none at all from a bad one. That is not the return.

The return is being present, in a machine-readable form, in the places that get read by something other than a person: search engines crawling for who exists in a category, and increasingly assistants answering "what tools are there for X". A product with fifteen listings is a product that has a shape in those systems. A product with none is one that has to be discovered from its own site alone.

Two things make that worth more than the number of links suggests:

  • Do-follow links. Some directories mark every outbound link nofollow, which tells search engines to ignore it. Check before you spend the ten minutes: view the source of any listing page and look at the rel attribute on the outbound link.
  • A page that says what you do in sentences. A listing that is a logo, a name and a URL is not readable by anything. One with a real description is.

Where this site fits

WhatAreYouBuilding.AI is a directory of independent builders and what they are shipping, and it is one of the ones on the list above rather than an exception to it. What it does differently: every listing carries a do-follow link, the whole catalogue is served through an open JSON API and an MCP server that any assistant can read without a key, and it is organised by country, category and funding stage rather than by launch date — so a listing keeps being findable long after the day you submitted it.

It is free, it stays free, and a person reads every submission before it appears. Submit a product, or read what a listing gets you first.

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