Show HN: Checklist of over 100 directories to submit your startup | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Checklist of over 100 directories to submit your startup

submitchecklist.com

323 pointsserhadiletir67 comments

AKA how to lose time pretending you are working for your startup. Much better spending the same time acquiring a single customer by talking with people, doing things that do not scale [1].

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Why do you think that my _particular_ audience frequents either of these directories? Entrepreneurs should go after their customers, first and foremost. Submitting to irrelevant directories is not only lost time. It's dangerous because it suggests that we are doing something useful and that we don't have to chase the real audience anymore.

I'm always wary of startup founders sharing startup launches to each other. Big red flag. Completely skews all advice/critique/reception.

Except when we're the target market.

Yep, I posted my website asking for critique, half the users were complaining about my 4s load time and didnt mention a thing about the information presented.

Thousands of people use my website a week, apparently they dont care about 4s load times.

My actual audience has bothered me to create more content more frequently.

Only on HN I heard that my products were ugly. None of thousands of users ever reported that.

Yep: I have a side project that I used stock bootstrap with. People on HN invariably complain about that. Actual users? Not one, ever.

I'm fine with others doing it so I can have a better picture of the competition in the personal finance sector that I'm developing an app for.

If it's B2C and you're going after affluent tech early adopters the folks that frequent these galleries likely are your target market.

There's something to be said for having a product that's stable and bug-free. If the first person to use your product does so in the middle of your first enterprise sale, it's probably not going to go very well.

A couple years ago, I saw a similar submission list for startups. Having recently launched, I took the list very seriously — checking out the sites and ranking them in order of desirability, then submitting to a couple sites each week with language that I had tailored to appeal to each site based on what they covered.

Nothing happened. A month or two later, I decided this was a waste of time. But before closing the remaining browser tabs (which were the ones low on my priority list), I decided to submit a one-sentence description to the remaining sites.

The next morning, I heard back from one of the sites [1], which not only wanted to feature my startup [2] — they also wanted to license our technology to make their website easier to read!

If there's a lesson to be learned from this N=1, it's that shorter is sweeter when it comes to pitches.

1: http://www.springwise.com

2: http://www.beelinereader.com/individual

Now they will do that for you for a $89 fee. "LET US SUBMIT FOR YOU 89$" A startup about startups about startups.

It sounds like the lesson you learned was to find and pitch potential customers. If that isn't the top of a founder's priority list, there's a fundamental problem occurring.

Any site that has a decent amount of text on it is a potential customer of ours, so all of the websites we submitted to could have licensed our tech.

The only difference is that I used a short pitch for the last ones and long pitches for the first ones.

Whilst this is pretty handy, I balked at the "let us submit for you for $89". Like - eek! Really?!

Also - the "get the pdf version" is really a dark pattern since you're not allowed to download it without first paying some non-zero amount that you laughably get to choose. Might be a bit nicer to say, "buy the pdf version".

It looks like “$0” as an amount works to get the PDF.

not when I try it it doesn't

As in type in “0” not leave it empty.

And now they have your email?

I guess the email becomes the price you pay.

It’s not a dark pattern(1) if you enter the amount yourself (and you can enter 0.01$ I assume).

(1) “Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn't mean to.” https://darkpatterns.org/

ok, maybe dark pattern is a bit strong, but I clearly clicked the button thinking I could just download it, and instead was presented with a form to buy it. It's a least a little disingenuous.

You don’t need to buy it, you can enter zero in the form and get it for free. It’s basically donationware

Interesting, I actually found the $89 a bargain given how long it will take to just create accounts on all these services before I can submit anything. That alone will take hours.

My worry is just that this service will quickly get marked as a spammer and probably blocked or downvoted as a poster in many places.

Agreed. $89 is basically 89 cents per submission. My time is worth a lot more than that. I would be glad to pay for this service (and probably will) just for the backlink juice.

I would be glad to pay for this service (and probably will) just for the backlink juice.

You should be very wary about doing that. Some of the link in the list are news sites (eg Mashable). If someone at a news site sees you're spamming them they'll be a lot less likely to cover your startup favourably in the future. While you might get some 'backlink juice' out of it, you could also be burning some very valuable bridges.

I don't think the chance is high that someone is going to NOT cover my company because they remember that some months prior I submitted a link to their site.

You didn't submit the link though. When a journalist does a quick search of their email to see what correspondence there's been before they won't see you. They'll see Eggradients, and whatever Eggradients put in that initial submission. That might be something great. Equally it might be terrible. Imagine if it said "Eggradients client ACME STARTUP is really good. Please contact Eggradients if you would like to know more!" Do you really want that to be the first contact your startup has with the media?

And that would be different from a standard PR company submitting me...how?

One is spammy, the other isn't

Not all backlinks are rated equally just FYI, same with reddit as well, if you linkspam it neither reddit nor its users like that and might be received poorly.

Great deal. Until you get a Google Penguin penalty and have to spend $10k+ in employee time getting it corrected, disowning backlinks and so on.

Some types of company see penalties (or cleanup cost) as a cost of doing business. If they make > $10k to incur $10k in costs, then it works out.

It's a faulty way of seeing things, but businesses like that tend to have a fog around them. They don't see the icebergs coming.

Why is it faulty?

Those fines usually exist for a reason. Just because you can pay your way out of consequences for the negative externalities doesn't mean it's good for anyone but your shareholders.

First failed assumption of course being that they'll automatically make > $10k

I will do the job for 50 bucks if you want...

Just to be clear, something like this will 99% get marked as a spammer and probably blocked or downvoted in HN.

Also, I HN it's very useful that the owner/submitter can answer the questions that appear in the comments of the post. The problem with mass submission / spam is that the owner can't mass answer all the comments in all the sites.

The UX is kind of confusing but it will accept $0 and email you the pdf, just tried it!

ah ok I see - you actually have to type "0". doh

So you advertise that you'll submit people's stuff to hackernews for money, on hackernews? I guess nice of you to give the admins a heads-up for the anti-spam systems ;)

How is this SEO spam on the front page?

I like how SEO articles like this one are trying so desperately to not seem like SEO scumlording anymore due to everybody realising over the past few years that it's mainly a very grimy/scummy industry full of fraud and grubbers. Go look at the google trend for "SEO" [1] (isn't very statistically rigorous, but y'know...).

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...

Isn't this just a minor pivot of now obsolete SEO directory spam?

Submitting to show HN, Crunchbase and /r/programming will require 3 dramatically different entries and info. I don't believe that's achievable for $89 unless you want to do it badly. What cost your reputation?

But the linked startup is about SEO, i.e. spamming/abusing these communities to generate links, by offering a paid service for it.

EDIT: I understand your comment now, yes it is. How this startup got funded I have no idea, it's a decade-old SEO "sh*tlording" technique :/

You assume it is funded. It could be a lone wolf with a submission script, or access to cheap labor. The site itself is hosted on a site builder, and payments are via Gumroad. (none of that is bad, but doesn't scream funded)

You are right, should of maybe included "if so". But still, surprising someone would think covering up SEO shitlording with such a thin veil would fool anybody. From the other comments here, it seems that the reason SEO is just generally negative in 90% of its aspects, has been forgotten. People have a short memory these days, and I'm sure that if people on HN have forgotten, then it won't be long until we have link spam, algo spam, cramming, bots, trackers, and the whole SEO shitlord shitlist back on the table.

Apologies for my French. It's just that HN is a lot smarter than this...

I'm amazed at the number of startups about startups.

This is what gets me about Indie Hackers. So much of it is people selling stuff to other people selling stuff to them.

It makes sense. Selling to other businesses (as opposed to consumers) is arguably the most reasonable market to go after. And if you have a very early-stage product, you'll be looking for early adopters and visionaries who are capable of and willing to take a risk on unproven technology to get a leg up.

It should be similarly unsurprising that companies like Apple, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Stripe, Salesforce, Google, SAP, Amazon, etc. could also be described as "selling stuff to other people selling stuff to them."

obligatory HN comment about selling shovels in a gold rush

No but this is such a pattern in human history. Don't fight war, sell the weapons. Don't mine bitcoin, sell the cards. Don't start a startup, start a meta-startup (startup about startups). Easy $$$! Basically be the parasitic side-liner supplying to the often-fruitless follies of mankind.

It's not too bad as long as you're making something genuinely good. I'm not likely to ever make it big as a musician, but that doesn't mean Ableton or the company behind Reaper are being shady by selling me software.

Of course, I was talking about being suppliers to rushes/"fads", i.e. the industries/sectors that appear out of nowhere for fordubious reasons and with ill-thought, i.e. wars, cali gold rush, 2002 internet companies, bitcoin, MOOCs, Javascript frameworks. All these are bandwagons that arose and quickly develop/devoloped to have many suppliers that exploit the confusion and hysteria.

Take a look at GPU company stock prices over the past 2-3 years for me will ye' ;)

So basically be Gary V.

What's the benefit of directory submissions? 5 visits? If you think are doing it for the magic word called SEO, think again

Thanks for all the comments. Gave me a lot of idea about the Q&A section on the web page which I building these days.

The only reason I built the Submit Checklist is that create a feedback generator. For this reason, the sending process takes a month if you willing to pay me to submit for you.

Enjoy the list

Have a nice day

What's the point of "submitting" to f6s? I only ever use them when I'm entering into a startup competition run through their site. I never thought of them as a place to submit startups other than this.

Seeing a site like this on the list makes me question the usefulness of other sites that I've not heard of.

edit: Also, some of the FB groups are either completely inactive (last post was months ago) or are satire (one sentence startup pitches).

I'd argue what's the point of submitting to 99% of these? Drive by visits rarely net anything, and I'd be willing to bet most of these won't even generate drive bys.

This is neat!

To all of the naysayers - submitting to messageboards is a perfectly fine way to get the word out about a product! Plus, I'd expect it to help with its googlability. There's no question that it is better to talk to actual customers, but where do you even find these people? How do you get them to talk to you? How about message boards with communities of different people looking to try out new ideas as a start?

If you don't know how to reach your market you have already failed.

What would be more interesting to me would be a list of places/social media that my customers frequently visit, and then grab my company name on those sites. Plenty of times I've asked customer how they've heard about me, and then I race to that platform only to find out there are no good names related to my product left.

Wow, this reminds me of the days in the late 90's to early 2000's where you would make a Windows downloadable application, and submit it to the hundreds of near identical software sites.

Why do I would like to submit to these directories if my startup were not for developers? AFAIK, this would only attracts more copycats than real users.

I would not submit to every directory, but definitely a good starting point just to get some backlinks, SEO juice, and mentions here and there.

You're sure to have troubles if put your website into that.

But congratulations to the author for the work and the Show HN.

wasnt there a startup that submits your site to all these directories for you for a price?

> 1 month proces

Typo btw

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