Show HN: Checklist of over 100 directories to submit your startup (opens in new tab)

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.

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

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".

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'm amazed at the number of startups about startups.

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).

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?

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