One afternoon, spent well
Where to submit your startup
Where to submit your startup, what each place is actually worth, and how to tell a free do-follow listing from one that wants a badge on your site first.
List your productFree · Do-follow · About a minute
Three different things get called "submitting your startup", and confusing them is why the exercise feels like it does nothing. A launch is one day of concentrated attention on a platform whose audience shows up for launches; it is an event, it mostly does not repeat, and it rewards preparation more than it rewards the product. A listing is a permanent page about your product on somebody else’s domain, usually with a link back to yours — no spike, no event, and it works quietly for as long as the page exists. A mention is a line in somebody’s roundup, which you earn rather than submit to. The first is a day of work for a day of traffic and the second is ten minutes for a page that keeps working, so if you have one afternoon, spend it on listings.
What you are actually buying
Three things wear the same name, and they are worth wildly different amounts.
A launch
One day of concentrated attention. An event, it mostly does not repeat, and it rewards preparation more than it rewards the product.
A listing
A permanent page on somebody else’s domain, usually with a link back to yours. It works quietly, for as long as the page exists.
A mention
A line in somebody’s roundup or newsletter. Unpredictable, and not something you submit to so much as earn.
How to actually get through them
The work is repetitive, so do it once and reuse it.
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.
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.
Submit five to ten a week, not 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.
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.
The launch platforms
An event rather than a page. Worth doing, and worth doing second if the afternoon is all you have.
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
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. Paid-only: there is no free submission.
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
The smaller launch boards. Each sends a smaller and more specific audience than Product Hunt, and collectively they are worth more than a second attempt there. Not all free: Uneed's free line needs 20 upvotes for a do-follow link, and Fazier's free tier asks for a backlink. There is a page comparing them.
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 kept current rather than published once.
LaunchIgniter’s directory list
A long list, maintained, and sorted by the thing you are looking for.
ScrollLaunch
Another kept-current list of places that accept submissions.
Smol Launch
Small by design, which is the point: fewer places, more of them real.
Growpad’s free SaaS directory list
Specifically the free ones, which is the filter most lists do not apply.
SiteGuru’s startup directory list
Written from a link-building angle, so it is explicit about what each link is worth.
myStartupTool
A directory of directories, kept up.
rushout09/directory-submission-sites
A repository, so getting listed is a pull request rather than a form. If you can open one, this is the easiest link on the page.
The badge that is really a price
The one pattern worth learning to spot before you spend an afternoon on forms.
How the request arrives
A directory offers you a free listing. Somewhere in the flow — sometimes after you submit, sometimes only in an email a week later — it asks you to add a "Listed on X" badge to your own site before the listing goes live, or before the link becomes do-follow. That is not a badge. It is a reciprocal link, and you are paying for a link with a link from a domain you own.
Why it matters, in two ways
Neither of them is that the directory is a scam:
- The trade is lopsided. Your site is one link to them from a page they do not control; their listing is one link to you from a page that sits among a thousand others.
- A network of sites linking to each other because each one required it is the oldest pattern in link schemes, and a thing search engines have been detecting for twenty years.
An optional badge is a different object entirely
If a directory offers you something to display after you are listed — your rank, your upvotes, the fact that you were reviewed — and the listing works identically whether or not you put it up, that is social proof and it costs you nothing to decline. Ours works that way: it renders live and it is the builder’s to use or ignore, and no listing anywhere on this site is gated on it.
So the check is one question
Would the listing be different if I never added the badge? If yes, it is a toll. If no, it is a badge. There is a longer version of this — how to read a rel attribute in two minutes, and what to do about badges you already added.
Where this site fits
One of the ones on the list above rather than an exception to it. Measured against the three things this page told you to check.
What it is
WhatAreYouBuilding.AI is a free, worldwide directory of what independent builders are shipping: AI, SaaS and dev tools, by country, category and funding stage.
Free, and it stays free
No paid tier to be listed, no fee to be looked at, and nothing to add to your own site first.
Reviewed before it appears
Usually within seconds, and by a person when anything about it is unclear. Nothing is auto-published.
Permanent and do-follow
The listing is a page of its own with a do-follow link to your site, organised by country, category and funding stage rather than by launch date, so it keeps being findable long after the day you submitted it.
Questions people actually ask
What the return really looks like, and the two checks that decide whether a listing is worth ten minutes.
How much traffic will one directory send me?
Small. A few visitors a week from a good one, none at all from a bad one — and 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 has a shape in those systems. A product with none has to be discovered from its own site alone.
How do I tell whether a listing is worth the ten minutes?
Two things make a listing worth more than the number of links suggests:
- A do-follow link. Some directories mark every outbound link nofollow, which tells search engines to ignore it. View the source of any listing page and look at the rel attribute on the outbound link before you spend the time.
- 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.
Should I skip a directory that asks for a badge first?
Skip anything that wants a link back before it will list you, or money before it will look at you. Not because it is immoral, but because you are being asked to pay first, at a price set by them, for a thing you have not seen. An optional badge offered after you are listed is a different object, and the section above has the one question that separates them.
Is a launch worth it at all?
Yes, once, properly, when you have something finished and a handful of people who will show up. It is a day of work for a day of traffic, which is a fair trade if you have the day. It is the wrong trade if the afternoon is all you have.
Why are most "best directories" lists useless?
Because most of them are affiliate pages that rank the ones paying the most. The lists worth using are the ones maintained rather than published once, which is the only filter applied to the section above.
The pages this one points at
The check worth running first, the launch half of the job, and what a listing here gets you.
Start with the one that takes a minute
Free, do-follow, permanent, and the badge afterwards is yours to ignore.