I wasted a week submitting to 30+ directories.

Yo guys,

So I just shipped the MVP for Askruit and immediately hit that wall where youre like okay cool, now what? Zero budget for ads obviously, so I went down the rabbit hole everyone talks about - directory submissions.

Spent literally a week of my life filling out the same boring forms over and over. Name, description, logo, screenshots... you know the drill. Did like 30+ of these things and I wanted to die halfway through lol.

Most were complete garbage. Some wanted $100 just to review my submission like wtf, others had that abandoned Wordpress vibe where the last post was from 2019. Straight up ghost towns.

But 5 of them actually worked tho. Got me around 120 users total and some decent feedback that actually helped me fix stuff.

If youre starting out seriously just ignore those massive submit to 200 directories lists, youll lose your mind. Heres what actually moved the needle:

BetaList - These guys are picky af about design. I almost didnt submit cuz my landing page was kinda rough but cleaned it up and got approved. Around 40 signups from there which was sick. People on BetaList WANT to try broken beta stuff so theyre super forgiving and give actual feedback instead of just bouncing. Free submission takes forever to get reviewed tho unless you pay to skip.

Product Hunt - Yeah everyone knows this one. But dont just show up and launch cold, I spent like a week before commenting on other launches, upvoting stuff, just being active. When I finally launched it helped alot. Traffic spike was insane but retention wasnt that great compared to BetaList. Still worth it for the initial push tho.

Uneed best - This one surprised me ngl. Way smaller than PH but conversion rate was better?? The guy running it seems like an actual dev who curates properly. Submission took 2 minutes, super smooth. Not gonna crash your server but quality over quantity.

LaunchTry - Newer platform, didnt expect much but the community there is really supportive. On bigger sites your launch gets buried in 5 minutes but here I stayed visible way longer. Good if PH feels intimidating which it def did for me at first.

Listyourbuild - No BS just a clean directory. Wont send you crazy traffic but I still get a few signups every week. Also probably good for SEO or whatever im not an expert on that stuff.

Anyway dont waste time on dead directories. Hit these 5 then go back to building or talking to actual users cuz thats what matters.

Anyone else been through this? Did I miss any good ones? Lmk what worked for you