Ten days ago I started submitting a very small Chrome extension to every startup directory I could find. I kept a row per attempt, with what happened and when. Here is the count as of this morning.
| Outcome | Rows |
|---|---|
| Abandoned before finishing | 33 |
| Submitted, still waiting | 19 |
| Live page | 22 |
| Blocked or rejected | 2 |
Seventy six rows. Twenty two of them describe a page that exists and can be read by a stranger.
Twenty two rows is not twenty two directories, and that distinction cost me an hour this morning. Some sites produced more than one page: a publisher profile plus a product listing, and in one case three separate profile pages on the same domain. Counted by domain instead of by row, eighteen sites carry at least one live page. Three of those are live in a way that does not help, which I will come back to. So fifteen.
I only found this because I counted twice and got different answers. The first count was rows, and I had already written a headline around it.
One number I cannot give you honestly: how many distinct directories I attempted. Most of the abandoned rows never produced a URL, because I never got far enough to have one, and the names I wrote down by hand are not reliable enough to deduplicate. So the denominator here is attempts, not sites, and I am not going to convert it into a success rate per directory when I cannot count the directories.
The thirty three I walked away from
I did not abandon these out of impatience. I filled in the whole form, uploaded the logo and the screenshot, wrote the tagline and the long description, and then hit something on the last screen.
The pattern was consistent enough to be predictable by the end. A submission flow that is free right up to the final step, where a plan selector appears. One of them charges a fee to review submissions at all, which they state plainly, and I respect that more than the ones that let you do forty minutes of work first.
Two asked for a badge on my own site in exchange for the listing. One asked for a phone number, twice, with a note that they would call.
None of this is a scandal. Running a directory costs money and nobody owes me a free listing. But the free tier is frequently a lobby rather than a room, and you only find out at the end.
The nineteen still waiting
Some of these will arrive. Two already did while I was writing the earlier draft of this post, five and six days after submitting, with no email either time. I found them by checking rather than by being told.
That is the practical lesson from this bucket. The directories that publish you often do not tell you. I now check every pending submission against the site's own sitemap, which is a file they publish listing what they have put online. It is authoritative, it needs no search engine, and it answers the question in about a second. Before I did that, I was waiting for approval emails that were never going to come.
The mirror image is also true: I got five emails in one day from directories, and every one of them was selling something. Not one was an approval.
The ones that exist
Here is where the number stops being flattering. I looked at what each live page actually carries:
- Some link to my site.
- Some link only to the browser store, which means they send visitors to a large company rather than to me.
- One is a profile page for me as a person, not a page for the product, which the directory's own sitemap made clear once I stopped assuming.
I had counted that last one as a win for a day. It was a real page, it was public, it named the product, and it was not the listing I submitted. The product had never been approved at all.
And three are live in a way that does not count. Two are pre launch pages on sites where the real listing appears on a scheduled date. One is a listing that carries a noindex, which I discovered by reading the page and confirmed later when the founder emailed me to offer, for a fee, the version that search engines can see. He was upfront about it. It still means the free listing exists only for people already on that site.
What I would tell myself ten days ago
Check the sitemap, not your inbox. Every directory publishes one, and it is the difference between knowing and hoping. Three of my submissions were live before I knew, and one of the ones I thought was live turned out to be a profile page.
A page with your name on it is not a listing. Look at what it links to. A listing that points at a store rather than at you has given you a mention, not a link.
Read the page for a robots tag before you celebrate. Not by searching the page for the word, which will find your own prose if you happen to be writing about it. Look for the actual meta element. One of my listings has been quietly invisible since the day it appeared.
Expect the last screen. If a flow is free and smooth for six steps, the seventh is where the plan selector lives. This is not universal and I have no way to know in advance, which is why I now do the whole form and treat abandonment as a normal outcome rather than a failure.
The good ones are silent. The two best listings I have, meaning real pages with real text and a link to my site, both arrived without a word. The five that emailed me all wanted money.
The part where I admit the size of this
Seventy six submissions sounds like a lot of work, and it was, but it produced fifteen useful pages for a product that costs 4 dollars a year. I have no way yet to tell you whether any of them sent a single visitor. That measurement is separate and I do not have it.
What I can say is narrower. Directory submissions are cheap in money and expensive in attention, under a third of the attempts produced a live page and a further three of those are live in name only, and a meaningful share of the hits are weaker than they look until you read the page. If you are doing this, budget for the reading, not just the submitting.
I have not named any of the directories, and that is deliberate. My sample is one product over ten days, pricing changes, and a policy I hit last week may not be the one you hit next week. Naming them would turn a small measurement into a verdict it cannot support. Run the same count on your own submissions and you will get your own list.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list. It is the product I was submitting. You can find it at blueticks.io.
The whole tracking system for this is a markdown table and about thirty lines of script that fetch each directory's sitemap and tell me whether my URL is in it. There is nothing clever in it. The only thing that mattered was deciding to check rather than to assume, and I was six days late to that.
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