DEV Community: Roman Vasilenko

280+ Top Directories to Submit Your Startup in 2022 [Definitive List]

Roman Vasilenko — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 21:19:02 +0000

It took me 80+ hours to comb through 2000+ startup resources and bring you the fullest list of websites where you can submit your startup or a pet project to date.

Read on to find out why I decided to conduct such in-depth research and how it can take you or your business to the next level

or jump to the list of websites now (available in Google Sheets and Airtable).

As a web developer with a marketing background, I know the difficulties other devs and up-and-coming tech companies face. Putting your business on the map at a low cost is no small feat.

Since one of the growth hacking ways is organic growth on search engines, I initiated extensive research to help me and other devs bootstrapping their way to success by taking their first link-building steps and getting exposure on high-traffic websites.

Here are a few reasons to consider submitting your project. By doing so, you could:

Get press coverage
Boost your website's organic traffic
Promote your product or services for free
Find early adopters or cofounders
Get early feedback on your prototype or software beta features
Pitch your business before launch and gain early user traction
Score extra funding in the development phase
Find networking and partnership opportunities
Build online visibility and brand awareness

If at least one of those made you nod in agreement, you're in the right place.

How I Came Up with the Startup Directories List

I am a member of a few SaaS communities, and one question that repeatedly appears in many groups for new startups is, *"Can you share a list of websites where I can launch and promote my startup?" *.

Is clicking hundreds of URLs and deciding if you should publish your startup there your thing? Didn't think so. That's why I chose to help founders save hundreds of hours by rethinking the way lists of startup directories are created.

How Did I Conduct the Research?

First, I crawled and audited all the available data from similar lists. Startup directories, such as those found on GitHub and Submit.co websites are the few standing out in terms of quality.

But they still need more critical information, like traffic potential or domain authority, to name a couple. So I decided to take things further and reviewed each startup directory list published since 2010.

Most resources on startup directories available online come from 2019 at best and lack valuable data or filters to narrow down the list. About 30% of links on existing lists of startup directories lead to closed, abandoned, or pivoted websites.

It sounds like a massive waste of time founders can't afford. So I decided to propose a solution for new startups out there. I manually went through every platform to ensure you never landed on a dead or irrelevant website.

Analyzing 99 crappy websites was worth it if there was a chance to get your startup at least one excellent backlink.

Here are the criteria I followed when manually crawling websites to submit your startup:

Is the website active? Does it publish new content regularly?
Is it relevant for digital startups and side projects (including games)?
Is there a direct way to create a listing or share content for publishing?
Would I publish my project there?
Is there any value for link building or brand awareness implied?

After gathering raw data and deduplicating it, I ended up with 2,016 websites. The next step was to exclude the ones with low DA and SEO potential.

To enrich my brand-new list of startup directories, I took the following data points into account:

How long does it take to submit your startup?
Is the directory free or paid?
How difficult is submitting your startup here?
Moz Domain Authority (DA)
Traffic volume
The top country in terms of website traffic
Website type (media, directory, forum, etc.)
Website's core topic
Trust and Citation Flow scores

The icing on the cake is the startup directory filtering. With this list, you can filter all the data according to your business needs and focus on directories that fit your product criteria.

Things to Consider Before Submitting Your Startup

After conducting market research, creating a team, and building an MVP comes the most challenging part of the startup lifecycle: promoting your SaaS product online, successfully showcasing your services to your audience, and getting the first users.

This list of websites to submit your startup is made to help you bring new products in front of early adopters or investors and improve your website authority by increasing exposure.

Before you promote your company in the media, let's cover the basics so you can decide which submission websites are a good fit and which are worth skipping.

What is Website Authority and Why is it Essential?

Google algorithm is an extensive, complex beast. There are likely thousands of ranking factors, and the list keeps growing.

It would help if you gained Google's trust (aka authority) to get more search traffic in the long run. And one of the most effective digital marketing techniques is link building.

If you are bootstrapping your product, a question like this will arise: *"Can I just pitch my business everywhere or buy backlinks for pennies from high-volume resellers?" *. Huh, if everything were that simple, SEO agencies wouldn't exist.

To get your domain authority (DA) growing, you need to get featured by websites with a higher domain authority than yours. DA is a metric defined on a scale from 0 to 100.

Compare your company website DA with a target website DA using free website authority checkers by Ahrefs or Moz. If the target website DA is higher than yours, that's a go-ahead signal to submit your startup there.
Another vital factor to consider is topical similarity. It means you want to get backlinks from websites that are relevant to your niche. If you sell a SaaS product for developers, backlinks from cooking blogs will get you nowhere, despite a higher DA and decent traffic volume. While there's more to it, this should suffice to choose from business media and startup ranking directories featured in our list.

Top Websites to Submit Your Startup

Here is a sneak peek of the startup directories that made it to our list. The following platforms should give you an idea of the quality I kept in mind while creating the directory list. Links to the complete list are available at the end of the section.

#IndieHackers

Indie Hackers is a collaborative community that brings tech business founders together. SaaS companies and B2B entrepreneurs share success stories and growth insights here. A startup owner like you can learn much about marketing new products and reach the target audience by getting your project featured on Indie Hackers.

Product Hunt

Chances are you don't need an introduction to the #1 go-to website to publish a startup or a side project. In case you do, Product Hunt is a digital platform where you can find the top new products and businesses. Share and geek out about the latest software, mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and other creations with like-minded people.

If you plan to submit your startup on Product Hunt, get ready to spend some time preparing for a launch. This How to Launch on Product Hunt guide by the PH team should help you with that.

Startup Stash

Startup Stash is a startup directory of tools and resources for entrepreneurs. This platform has everything you need for your startup liftoff: from investors and product development software to launch insights and showcasing opportunities. Startup Stash is also the most upvoted service on Product Hunt.

Starter Story

StarterStory is a startup directory platform interviewing successful entrepreneurs and providing insights about launching products and running a business. Each post covers how entrepreneurs kick off their projects, build visibility, acquire users or investments, and deal with daily challenges. Have a startup story to share? StarterStory is an excellent place to do so and get feedback from the community.

F6S

F6S is a global community of 16,000 enterprises and startup projects. Their service connects new startups and companies with early adopters, accelerators, angel and venture capital investors. On the F6S platform, you can also find jobs, grants, partnerships, and exposure opportunities. They offer help to get your startup and side projects up and running.

Here are a few more great directories for new startups from the list:

🚀 The complete list is available in Airtable and Google Sheets below. Choose the one you prefer and make it yours!

You can get a copy of the list and reuse it however you want. Just make sure to cite me if you are going to republish it.

How to Save Time Publishing New Startups

After you are done using the filters and identifying the best directories to feature your startup, you should end up with about 20 websites.

The next challenge is preparing a perfect pitch and other info you will attach to your listings and company profiles. Here's what you need to prepare in advance to save time on retyping the same things over and over again:

Website URL
Your Logo
Your Location
Number of Employees
Target market segment
Information on your venture/angel fundraising achievements, if any
Approximately 3-5 screenshots/images of your products
Product video (Not necessary across all platforms)
Founding year
Founder(s) name
Founder(s) bio
Awards
Both brief & long descriptions (create about three copies of each for variation)
Tags
Who's the product for / What problems it solves
What makes your business different from competitors
Social media handles
Pricing details
600-2,000 words article or press release about your product

As for the last point, chances are you're not thrilled with writing different copies for multiple websites. Instead, you can use tools such as Writesonic to assist with copywriting or hire content writers on Upwork.

Some websites request even more business information, but these are the most common points. Have it ready before you go through the list.

Despite the substantial amount of time saved on gathering, cleaning, and enriching the list, you still need to invest 5-10 hours reviewing the list and submitting your startup information. Here is a better if you have an extra $100 budget to save a hassle.

Here is a step-by-step guide:

Create a Google Drive folder with all information about your company.
Create a copy of the prepared list and save it with all the filters applied.
Hire a virtual assistant on Upwork or Fiverr for $5-10 per hour.
Share access to the folder from Step 1.
Monitor the performance.

Tip: Add an extra column into the spreadsheet with your list where the freelance assistant will place submission URLs for you to track.

How to Track Results after Getting Featured

Below is the list of software and KPIs to keep an eye on after submitting your business:

Freemium tools with limited features: Ahrefs or Semrush

KPIs: Domain Rating (Ahrefs) or Authority Score (Semrush), Referring domains, Backlinks, Keyword Rankings

Free service: Google Analytics

KPIs: Traffic volume and Conversions from Organic and Referral sessions.

Conclusion

Now all you need to get your startup's initial organic traffic and awareness momentum growing is to find the right words for your perfect pitch and write down all the essential info about your business.

Let's do a quick recap of how to publish your project using this directories list:

Get your copy of the startup directory list.
Filter it according to your website's DA, topic, and other values.
Prepare your startup pitch and other essential info about the company.
Organize files from Steps 1, 2, and 3 in a Google Drive folder.
Hire a freelancer to post info from Step 3 on websites from Step 2.
Track results for 2-3 months. Your traffic, DA, and rankings should improve.

The last step is to leave a comment below when your product is live. 😉 I wish you all the luck in the world!

Learning How to Learn. Methods for Improving Learning Efficiency.

Roman Vasilenko — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 11:10:28 +0000

"Education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think."
Albert Einstein

Back in the day, when I decided to step into the programming world, I took some time planning to avoid the bumps that came my way in the past. I knew that software development would be the hardest, most memory-consuming, and brain-twisting subject I had ever learned. Therefore, my first question was:

Are there better ways to learn? If yes, what are the best methods for improving learning efficiency?

Aside from complexity, it was obvious that I would be learning from dozens of sources (digital and physical) and different settings (home, commute, office). This would create a mess of notes, links, and media across books and multiple devices, leading to the second question:

What tools do I need to excel in studying without drowning in materials to maximize the takeaways I learn?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I came across a few mindblowing studies and materials that left me wondering, why on earth this isn't taught in schools yet?! The "system" or methodology I acquired after my research satisfied me. I still use it and find it highly efficient. After reading, you will be able to improve your learning skills, and the outcomes will help you improve at whatever you are trying to excel in.

Why standard learning methodology is broken

Rereading

One of the most common revision techniques that students use in their studies is rereading when they repeatedly get back to the source of information to remember more details from it.

There have been lots of studies analyzing its efficiency. Some of them are listed in the list of references.

J. Dunlosky, one of the authors of "Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques..." research summarized:

Based on the available evidence, we rate rereading as having low utility... although rereading is relatively economical with respect to time demands... when compared with some other learning techniques rereading is also typically much less effective.

Given that a few pieces of research have shown that rereading has low utility, I concluded not to waste time doing that.

Highlighting and underlining

Highlighting is another very popular studying strategy. Luckily, several solid pieces of research were done on highlighting I could get advice from as well.
Summarizing the same research "Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques...":

On the basis of available evidence, we rate highlighting and underlining as having low utility...

It may actually hurt performance on higher-level tasks that require inference-making.

It feels productive to colorize the book and gives a sense of a safety blanket. You know that whenever you need this information in the future, you will easily find it in the book. The problem is that you create a reference to that highlighting point but need to put the piece of knowledge in your long-term memory instead.
On another note, will I remember the highlight location, given so many materials to come in the future? The research says we could be doing more efficient things.

Summarizing method (note-taking)

This is my favorite part of the conclusions I've made. My laziness screams when I have to summarize. All teachers in my life advised this technique to solidify the material. What a relief it was to learn there is a better way to learn than summarizing.

Even though a few studies are concluding that students who summarize the topics well, perform slightly better than others, it's hard to test this. As you can imagine, different people have various quality of their summaries. Hence you never know if it helps or not.

Another conclusion by J. Donlosky from the same research says:

On the basis of the available evidence, we rate summarization as low utility.

It can be an effective learning strategy for learners who are already skilled at summarizing; however, many learners (including children, high school students, and even some undergraduates) will require extensive training, which makes this strategy less feasible.

The "why"

Before going straight into the methods, let's recap what is at stake if we keep learning ineffectively. We could have been doing the same as always, reading, highlighting, taking notes; it brought us to where we are, we survived, and why bother, right?

Well, try learning something dense in terms like medicine, programming, or formulas-rich like mechanical engineering or architecture. The chances are you'll end up with something like:

Low competitiveness. Always in need of an external resource to rely on (books, notes, google).
Wasted time and money on content consumption. Consumed a ton of materials and felt like you got it but ended up with a blank mind in front of a practical task.
Limited career choices and a mediocre path. If your brain doesn't form enough neural links between bits of information, you can't be flexible and creative enough to offer something new to what exists.
Zero to low return on investment in education. You are consuming professional content daily, paying for new courses, and piling notes to save all of that for a particular moment in the future when they will be helpful. In reality, you use only a fraction of it on some lucky day.

Any topic, especially programming, requires a lot of effort to remember concepts and facts that become a platform for future practice and innovation. However, practical tasks appear surprisingly uncommon when they are not placed well enough in the memory and adequately massaged.

Sub-conclusion

Common learning methods provide the direction and a sense of a safety blanket but fail when you need to take knowledge into practice.
Rereading and highlighting should be thrown away due to low utility and least effective learning methods.
Information seems handy, but when I need it, the memory returns "404 - Page Not Found".
Summarizing can help if you are trained and have developed a high-quality output, but there are more effective options.

Since we learned what not to do, let's find methods that beat the above by eternity and don't require groundbreaking efforts.

The Most Effective Learning Formula (by far)

Effective Learning = Active Recall + Spaced Repetition

1. Active Recall

Active Recall means that to start solidifying the information in our memory, we need to take it out without external help.

This is the opposite of standard methods like note-taking or rereading when you passively get back to something. Active Recall forces you to go through the jungles of the memory (neural links) and build the speedway, so the moment you need to remember something, you have a straight, green light path to the memory slot with the required information.

To prove the point, below is the result of a study made in 2010 by Andrew C. Butler (Journal of Experimental Psychology) comparing how different students handled the test. Half of the students took a practice test after the study session (blue bar), and another half used typical studying methods, such as rereading, highlighting, etc. (white bar).

Students who did the practice test (active Recall) had 30-60% better results than those who didn't. This was the first "Aha!" moment. Now I know something that will give me an edge, comparing not only to my previous way of learning but also to others who are still learning ineffectively.

On one side, I have to make the mental effort to recall material after each study, which isn't the most pleasant thing to do, as the brain is lazy (a.k.a. energy efficient). But on the other side, I don't have to waste time rereading material, writing it down, organizing, and remembering notes' location. What a time saver!

Active Recall Strategies

I found a few strategies that work well within the Active Recall strategy.

My favorite one is the Cornell note-taking system. Instead of taking a note by writing down what just was heard or read, the better strategy is to write down questions about the paragraph or a chapter while reading. After finishing reading, watching, or listening, you should close the source and do your best to answer the list of collected questions. If not possible, get back and revise, close the source and try recalling it again.

By this, instead of mirroring what was just consumed, you should have your version of the studied material in your voice and your words. This also helps to iron the road and build new neural links around the fact or concept.

TOOL TO USE

I like using Notion as a collection of questions and answers on any material I come across and want to make sure to memorize. No matter where I am, I can snap a question on my phone or laptop and be sure it is accessible whenever I need it.

2. Spaced Repetition

The Forgetting Curve

Active Recall is by far the best method to grasp the learning material and place it in your brain. However, it still doesn't solve the problem of forgetting stuff in a week, month or year (!sic).

No matter how well you understand and recall, you will forget things exponentially.

The main idea of the forgetting curve and how we can take advantage of it is that every time we interrupt it, we reset it for a more extended period. In other words, the more often you recall things, the longer they will not be forgotten.

This is called flattening the forgetting curve.
Source: Practical Psychology

The problem with our memory is that we retain only about 80% of the information after 24 hours from studying something. In three days, we retain only 60%; in 6 days, more than 80% is gone. How crazy and, unfortunately, relatable this is, I thought! This is like working hard to earn $1,000 and having more than $800 evaporated in one week without spending a dime.

That is where spaced repetition comes in. I like to think about it as insurance. You have to pay for it by making mental efforts, but you are confident that whatever you placed into the spaced repetition system, and more importantly in your brain, will stay there.

The study above suggests repeating new material in at least 1, 3, and 6 days gap between repetitions. This allows the brain to start forgetting the material between repetitions, and when the active recall day comes, you have to force some brain power to take this information out of the brain and flatten the forgetting curve.

To summarize Spaced Repetition, the more times we actively recall, the more spaced out our repetition becomes, and the more likely we are to encode this information in our long-term memory.

TOOL TO USE:

To incorporate and automate spaced repetition, I use the flashcard tool Anki App. I make sure to transfer all notes (questions and answers) from Notion into the Anki app and resurface them daily based on the spaced repetition.

Summary

Here are the answers to questions I made myself in the beginning:

Q1: Are there better ways to learn? If yes, what are the best methods for improving learning efficiency?

To improve our learning efficiency and maximize our chances of solidifying new knowledge long-term, we need to transition from traditional strategies, such as rereading, copy-paste note-taking, highlighting, and summarizing. The science suggests two strategies for this transition to happen: Active Recall and Spaced Repetition, which we discussed above.

My outcomes

Here are a few things I highlighted after incorporating these strategies into my learning:

Started remembering way more information.
Use whatever I learn more often in practice.
Increased confidence in my learning abilities.
Identified the power of deep learning instead of remembering many facts.

I noticed that sometimes I only understood something once I placed it into the AnkiApp. In a few days of recalling the complex topic, I surf through it in theory and practice.

Q2: What tools do I need to excel in studying without drowning in materials to maximize the takeaways I learn?

Notion + Anki App + some new habits

How I did it

By building these three simple habits:

Note the facts and concepts as questions and answers.
Add notes to AnkiApp or a similar app of your choice (Anki is the best IMO).
Incorporate studying Anki cards into the daily routine. I like doing it the first thing I start my computer in the morning, which takes 15-30 mins to complete.

So far, I have more than 600 flashcards (questions and answers) in my AnkiApp. The most fascinating and satisfying part is that I can randomly open anyone and give the correct answer on the spot.

Resources

Continue learning

How to study for exams - Evidence-based revision tips (highly recommend)
How to Study for Exams - Spaced Repetition | Evidence-based revision tips (highly recommend)
How To Use Anki Like A Pro (highly recommend)
Make It Stick - The Science of Successful Learning
Learning How to Learn (optional but super helpful)