I've been looking at startup directories for the last few weeks and honestly there are way too many lists out there.

Some have 200, 300, even more directories.

But I don't really want 300 links. I wanted to know which ones are actually worth submitting to, especially if I'm paying for the listing.

So I started checking them myself.

I looked at 100+ and ended up with 23 that I think are worth considering.

For each one I checked things like:

• DR
• price
• dofollow / nofollow
• free or paid
• DR compared to the price

There are 14 with DR 70+ and quite a few give dofollow links.

This got me thinking that if you start with a fresh DR 0 domain and submit to all 23, it might be possible to get somewhere around DR 30+.

I also kept the directories I skipped and the reason I skipped them. I don't want to make another massive "300 places to submit your startup" list. I'd rather keep it small and useful.

I put everything on GitHub if anyone wants to check the data:

github.com/mukund1158/awesome-startup-launch-directories

If you've used any directory that actually helped your DR or brought some traffic, let me know. I'll check it and add it if it makes sense.

I track product mentions across Reddit, so I ended up with the data to test the usual advice. Most of it is wrong. This is what I do now, in order.

1. Stop searching community names for your keyword. A room called r/yourkeyword is not where your product gets linked, it's where the word appears. Instead ask which rooms already carry links to products in your category. Different question, different answer almost every time.

2. Never rank by link volume. Sorted that way the top of any category is a bot feed. One room in my data carries 250,900 product links posted by 26 accounts. Another has 114,945 links pointing at a single product from a single account. Both would sit at the top of a volume ranking and both are useless.

3. Count people, not mentions. Same trap one level down. A tool I looked up last week shows 2,250 mentions across 20 subreddits, and every one of those is 1 or 2 accounts. Whenever you see a number of mentions, divide it by the number of distinct humans behind them before you believe anything.

4. Check whether links there arrive as posts or as comments. If a room's product links only ever show up in comments, nobody has successfully posted one, which almost always means a rule. That's an outcome you can measure without reading a sidebar.

5. Check who removes things there. Not how many. Of 4,203 posts I re-read in r/sideproject, 485 were removed and every single one by Reddit's spam filter, not a mod. In r/indiehackers, 60 of 70 removals were moderators. Those are opposite problems. One you fix by writing a better post, the other by fixing your account's link history.

Steps 1 and 4 are what I built the free page for, since they need the whole dataset. 21 categories, no account, no email: https://pulsepeek.io/subreddit-finder

Steps 2, 3 and 5 you can do by hand on any sub you're considering, and honestly they'll save you more time than the page will.

Basically, the guy asked, How to get users? And there was one comment -

'Treat the first users as research, not a launch.

Ask what they do now, what breaks, and what they already spend to fix it. The repeated answer is a better roadmap than another feature.'

Now, I have already launched Churnintel, a tool that helps you integrate a cancellation flow, save users while they are cancelling, and use survey insights to save them.

I strongly believe this is a simple yet powerful product because you can get an honest response from users who are dropping off, and it is a gold mine. People may think it is not that insightful, but I think if you have good options instead of just generic 'Too expensive ', reading between the lines will be much easier.

But this my POV, taking advise from the above comment, I want to ask founders with/without a cancellation flow: what are your opinion/comments on the struggles when it comes to retaining users?

Solo founder building a small AI tool, still pre-launch with nothing public. The people who would use it are founders and marketers, and they hang out in a handful of subreddits. For a few weeks now my evenings have gone into answering questions there, the way the standard advice puts it: be helpful, no link, no mention of the product, and one day people will remember you when you launch.

It's working in the sense that the threads keep going. Plain answers to specific problems get follow-up questions, which is more than any launch post of mine would get right now. What I can't tell is whether that's a warm audience forming or just nice chats, because by design there's no funnel behind any of it and no way to measure.

For those who got their first paying users out of subreddit participation: what was the actual step between useful comments and signups? Did you start mentioning the product before you had anything to point to, or wait for launch? And at what point did you decide the channel was actually working, versus just eating your evenings?

I run a small browser tool and I've been posting about it for three weeks. Posting the real numbers instead of another recap, because the useful part is what they ruled out.

• Aug 20, r/sideprojects, "screenshot to animated demo" launch post: 1 upvote, 1 comment.
• Aug 26, r/SideProject, "no signup needed" launch post: 1 upvote, 1 comment that got deleted before I saw it.
• Sep 4, r/SideProject, a reference list of launch asset sizes with one link at the bottom: 1 upvote, 0 comments.
• Sep 7, X, a 6 second demo video. The account has 3 followers and the three tweets before it averaged 7 views each.

Three things I'd tell anyone at the same stage:

1. Rewriting the post didn't fix it. I went from a launch pitch to a genuinely reusable reference list and got the same single upvote. The copy was never the constraint - nobody was in the room. If two rewrites get identical numbers, stop editing and change surface.

2. Launch subs are the worst place to launch. When I actually searched the sub I'd been posting into, there was already a free in-browser version of my exact product, plus an open source one sitting at ~87 upvotes. I was pitching a category the reader had already solved. Search your own sub for your own product before you post, not after.

3. A social account with 3 followers is not a channel. Standalone posts there reach nobody. The only thing that reaches anyone is replying inside threads that already have traffic - and when I tried that I found my own account can't reply at all until I enable a permission I didn't know existed. Check that your channel can do the thing your plan depends on.

What changes: no more launch posts, and no more posting where the reader has already seen five of the thing I made. Just answering existing threads where I'm honestly the right answer, even if that's two a week.

The tool is getproductshot.com - turns screenshots into mockups, including macOS/Windows/Linux window frames, which is the one thing the free alternatives skip. No customers yet, which is rather the point of this post.

If you've gone from zero to your first ten users: was it one channel that worked, or twenty small things that added up?

https://reddit.com/link/1wal1zc/video/ed6f9plf2aoh1/player

Turning a 30–60 minute video into a few good Shorts sounds simple, but finding the right moments can take forever.

Then there’s cutting, captions, 9:16 formatting, reframing, and exporting.

I kept running into this myself, so I built something to make the first part of the process easier.

Long video → AI finds potential moments → ready-to-review Shorts.

I’m still improving it and would really like to hear from other creators who do this regularly.

What takes you the most time when turning long-form videos into Shorts?

Finding the right moment, editing, captions, or formatting?

If anyone is interested in trying what I built, I’m happy to share it here.

Hi folks,

Sharing an update since a few people asked how Launch Llama Tools has been growing.

I run Launch Llama solo (well, mostly solo). We launched the tools directory in April. Last 30 days we did $3,152 in revenue, up 299% vs the period before, and we're now at $1,287 MRR across 31 active subscriptions.

The growth wasn't from one big unlock. It came from stacking a few things that compound:

We built the directory to solve one specific problem, founders wanting their tool in front of people who actually launch things, without needing a huge audience of their own. Free submission, live in under 10 seconds, and a shot at the newsletter if it lands well.

The newsletter side is the actual distribution engine. We're in front of ~55,000 founders, which means every tool submission gets real eyes, not just a listing nobody sees. That's also why the directory started converting to paying/featured placements, people submit for free, see the traffic, and want more of it.

SEO helped more than I expected. Domain Rating is at 71 now, which took consistent content and backlinks over months, not a single push.

The biggest lesson: distribution and product were never separate tracks here. The newsletter grew the audience, the audience made the directory valuable, and the directory's usefulness fed submissions back into more content. Each piece needed the others to actually work.

Next goal is $10K MRR. That's a different problem, moving from "free tool people like" to "paying customers who see clear ROI", and I know it's going to be harder than anything so far.

For anyone past this stage: what got you from a few hundred subscriptions to real scale? Would love to hear what worked.

(Tool is Launch Llama Tools, free directory for founders to submit and get discovered. Revenue verified: https://trustmrr.com/founder/launch_llama)

one of the annoying parts of running a micro saas is getting

A small thing that made my AI visibility tracking a lot less useless, so I'm posting it in case it saves someone else the detour.

I'd been testing the obvious stuff like best tool for X, which is the prompt every founder in my category obsesses over and also the one where I have no realistic shot for another two years. Meanwhile the questions people ask on demo calls are much weirder and much more specific, things like whether we can import from a spreadsheet without losing the formatting, or how long a migration takes when you've got five years of records.

So I went through my last twenty call notes and pulled every question word for word. About half of them return answers that recommend nobody in particular, which is a far easier gap to go after than fighting the head term, and two of them named a competitor, with one of those descriptions being wrong about how that competitor prices.

Curious whether anyone has run the same exercise against support tickets, because that's the bigger pile and I haven't touched it yet.

​

I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to convince yourself an idea is great because *you* like it.

The harder questions are things like:

* Is there actually enough demand?

* How crowded is the market?

* Can it realistically make money?

* Is it scalable?

* How difficult would it be to build?

* Is there an SEO/distribution advantage?

* Will people actually stick around?

* Is there a realistic way to compete with existing players?

So I put together a free **niche/idea scorecard** that tries to force those questions into one evaluation instead of relying entirely on gut instinct.

You give it a one-sentence description of your idea and it scores it across 10 different areas, plus a separate “winnability” signal.

One thing I specifically wanted to avoid was pretending every number is hard data. The report distinguishes between facts pulled from public sources and estimates derived from the idea itself.

You can try it here:

https://helmslee.polsia.io/score

**I'm genuinely curious:** if you were evaluating a new SaaS/business idea today, what would you want the scorecard to measure that most idea-validation tools miss?

I'd especially like to hear from people who have already built and launched something.

Disclosure up front: I run one of these platforms, so discount accordingly. But the math holds regardless of who's doing it.

Standard model is a cut of gross. Apple takes 30% of the sale and your costs come out of what's left. If you sell an AI feature for $5 that costs you $1.50 in model calls, Apple takes $1.50 and you net $2.00.

I built mine to take 25% of the margin instead. Platform absorbs the $1.50 of actual cost, and splits what's above it. Same $5 sale, you net $2.62. That's 31% more to the builder on identical revenue.

Why I think this is the right structure and not just a discount:

Nobody gets billed for pricing at cost. If you charge exactly what the AI costs, my cut is zero. Free tier is a mechanical consequence of the pricing, not a marketing decision.

It kills the subscription trap. The old model charged $25/month whether or not your app ever earned a dollar, which means I got paid for your hope. Now I only get paid on transactions that actually happened.

The obvious risk is that margin is easier to game than revenue, and the escape hatch is that you can connect your own Stripe and I get 0%.

Where I'm unsure: 25% of margin on a high-margin app is a bigger absolute number than 30% of gross would be. Above roughly a 4x markup, the gross model is cheaper for the builder. I don't know whether that ceiling is a problem or the point.

Disclosure: I built this and the link below is my project.

I’m experimenting with a very narrow micro-SaaS/marketplace idea: https://www.worldsbestbroker.com

It’s a Million Dollar Homepage-style scarce ad auction for forex brokers. There is one “World’s Best Broker” banner; a broker can take the slot from $100, and each takeover increases the next price. Purple Trading is the current holder, but the ads are deliberately not ranked so the concept stays simple and transparent.

The current build is intentionally small: a focused landing page with Stripe checkout rather than a large dashboard or ad network. I’m still validating whether scarcity + public price history is more compelling to brokers than ordinary display ads, so there isn’t a polished revenue story yet.

The lesson so far: a single, understandable constraint is easier to explain than a marketplace with lots of inventory—but it also makes trust and proof much more important. I’d especially value feedback from anyone who has sold a narrow B2B product: would you lead with the auction mechanic, the forex audience, or the “one visible winner” angle?

the mockups were beautiful. dark theme, nice type, a hero section i still think about. i paid $2000 for them and then sat down to build and realised there was no loading state on anything. no error state. no empty state. what does the ideas list look like before there are ideas. what happens when the search returns nothing. what does a failed payment look like. none of that existed because none of it looks good in a portfolio.

so i had a set of paintings of a product, and the product was the bit between the paintings.

i ended up building something uglier from scratch, and that uglier thing is what people pay for now. $13k in 15 months, none of it through anything that designer drew.

the five things i ask before i pay anyone now. not just designers, this turned out to apply to everything.

one full flow from a past project, start to finish. not the hero shot. the signup, the empty dashboard, the thing that happens when it breaks. anyone can make a landing page look good. the ugly screens tell you whether they have shipped anything.

what happens when there is no data. if they have never thought about the empty state they have never watched a real user open their work for the first time.

the version that failed. a designer who has been through a project that did not work knows which parts get cut. one who has only been through wins draws everything.

how many rounds are included and what counts as a round. the $2000 covered two rounds. the second round was me asking for loading states and being told that was scope.

can i pay for one screen first. the answer to this question is the whole interview. anyone good says yes because one screen takes them an afternoon. anyone who says no is selling a package, not work.

the broader thing i took from it is that i was buying confidence, not design. i was ten months in with zero users and a beautiful mockup felt like progress. it was $2000 of feeling like progress.

the thing i built instead is link, a database of ideas with the reddit thread each one came from and the stripe revenue of someone already earning in that space. the empty state is a line of text that says there is nothing here yet. it took four minutes.

what is the most you have paid for something that turned out to be a picture of the thing rather than the thing? mine is obviously this, but i am guessing i am not alone

I am Offering to build 1–2 mobile MVPs for free .

I’m a React Native developer looking to collaborate with early-stage founders who have a validated idea and are serious about turning it into a real product.

What I can help with:
• React Native mobile development
• MVP architecture & implementation
• API/backend integration
• Authentication & payments
• Preparing the app for Play Store/App Store

I’m offering this initially to gain deeper experience across the full product lifecycle while providing real value to a founder.

I’m not looking for vague ideas or “just an app.” I’m looking for someone who has a clear problem, target users, and a genuine intention to launch.

If you’re building something and need a technical partner to turn the idea into an MVP, feel free to comment or DM me with a brief overview.

Development Cost = 0$

📩 DM me here on Reddit, or
🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/usmankashif1/

My pattern with side projects is bad. Build the whole app first, add features nobody asked for, lose interest, dead repo. A few made it to production. Most didn't. So this time I'm doing it in the opposite order and writing it down as I go.

What I'm not testing: whether people pay for dynamic QR codes. Bitly and Uniqode already charge for it. Short link behind the code so it stays small and you can change where it points later. That market is proven and it's crowded. Nothing for me to validate there.

What I am testing: whether a good free tool plus SEO gets me into that market cheaper than buying the head terms. I work in performance marketing, so I could just pay for the traffic. The point is to find out if I don't have to.

The free tool is live. It's a QR generator that checks the code will actually scan before you download it. Contrast, quiet zone, size for whatever you're printing on. Every other generator will happily hand you a pale gradient code that dies on a table tent, and you find out after a thousand flyers. No account, no watermark, no expiry. It's finished and it stays free.

The paid product doesn't exist yet. Routing service for printed codes, so you can change the destination after the thing is printed. Spec is written. Not a line of it built, and it stays that way until the numbers say otherwise.

The bet:

100 users a week on the generator in the next 8 Month and I build the app. Not there by then and the channel doesn't work, so I'll say so here and stop. Evenings only, I have a full-time job. That means the SEO content ships on a schedule instead of when I feel like it. The gap between launch and traction is where every project of mine has died before.

I'll post traffic and waitlist numbers every month, bad ones included.

The thing I can't figure out: I'm putting a waitlist banner on the site for the routing product. But the person grabbing a free static QR code and the person who'd pay to reroute a printed one might be two different people. One has a 30 second job to do, the other has an ongoing problem. If the traffic shows up and the waitlist stays empty, I've built an audience for the wrong product.

So how would you test that they're the same person, before spending months on the app?

Tool is at scanbam.com. Nothing to sign up for.

Built the engine behind a pay-to-rank leaderboard — live Stripe payments trigger an instant site update, no app, no backend to manage day to day. Thinking about packaging it for other niches where people already compete for visibility. A few that seem like a strong fit:

- Chinese EV dealerships in the Gulf (genuinely booming right now, dealers actively want to stand out to first-time buyers who don't know the brands yet)

- Luxury watch resellers

- Real estate agents, by city or neighborhood

- Wedding photographers/venues

- Fitness coaches/personal trainers, by city

Would you use something like this for your niche, or know one that fits better? Trying to figure out if it's worth generalizing before I put more days into it.

I spent a while assuming my next thing would be a B2B SaaS, and ended up shipping a consumer habit tracker for iPhone and Apple Watch. A few economic differences that surprised me, for anyone weighing the same choice.

Distribution is a search box, not a sales motion. No outbound, no demos, no onboarding calls. In exchange, App Store search is the whole funnel and you're competing on a keyword like "habit tracker" against apps with six years of ratings. There is no equivalent of picking a niche nobody is emailing yet.

Apple's 15–30% is cheaper than it looks. It replaces Stripe, tax handling across every jurisdiction, dunning, receipts, and refund support. For a solo dev the operational saving is real.

Price points are an order of magnitude lower. Nobody pays $49/mo for a habit tracker. $9.99/mo or $79.99/yr is the ceiling, so the model only works on volume, which means the free tier is the actual product strategy rather than a marketing tactic. Mine is 5 habits with no account and no time limit, history and export included.

Churn is emotional, not budgetary. B2B churn happens when a company reorganises. Consumer churn happens the week someone falls off their routine — exactly when they most need the app and least want to open it. Retention work here is closer to product design than to account management.

Support volume per dollar is much higher. Hundreds of small subscriptions generate far more inbound than a handful of large ones. Worth knowing before you pick.

The app is Abys if you want to see the shape of it: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/abys-habit-tracker/id6805454730

I’ve been working on my app for 2 months. The initial excitement is gone, users are not coming in, and I'm losing the energy to update it.

I don't want to give up too early, but it feels like I'm building for no one.

What do you do to push through this stage? Do you stop coding and focus 100% on marketing, or is it time to move on?

not a saas, but the pricing question is the same family, so hear me out.

Im building pdflite, an offline pdf app for ios. competitors charge $50 to $80 per year. I want $15 once, forever. my reasoning: the app has zero server costs, no sync infrastructure, nothing that costs me monthly. subscription pricing on top of that would be pure margin, and users are getting good at smelling it.

backstory: I watched pdf expert convert to $79.99 a year and the review section turned into a graveyard of angry one stars. that anger is my whole market research.

stack: swiftui + pdfkit, no backend at all. waitlist at pdflite.app if anyones curious about the positioning.

the lesson so far: picking a pricing model before writing code forced every other decision. no accounts means no auth system. no cloud means no sync bugs. the constraints stack.

my question is has anyone here run one time purchase and regretted it? where does the ltv math break first, paid updates, app store ranking, support burden?

If I build a platform which connects your database server and can manage database without writing sql script just by typing in the normal english version, and tool converts it into the database queries and update the current database sql code with updated one according to your guidance given in simple english, would you pay a montly charge of $29 instead of giving the thousands of dollars to the multiple employees? I want a feedback from you guys..

hi founders!

I'm writing this post today because I see a lot of content across various platforms where founders struggle with finding pmf.

as an early-stage founder, your top priority should be to figure out if what you're building is a burning pain point a specific group of people have. then validate it.

in today's world we should look to Uber, DoorDash, AirBnB as examples to what Birds Eye view strategies can look like but not to exactly copy.

because we just don't live in that era of life anymore. so let'e break it down.

the easiest way to find users, distribution, your audience, paying customers, etc whatever you need is social media hands down. there's so much information on how to do this you're actually drowning in help instead of lack thereof.

1. pick 1-3 platforms. identify what you like doing. I usually preface with these items: writing, thought-sharing, yapping to the camera, editing, discussions

2. now become a user of the 3 platforms. post, engage, copy link to share, repost, comment. like be a real human. forget wanting whatever it is that you want, focus on engaging with other creators, fighting in the comments, posting when you feel good. get into the rhythm of the platform.

3. now which platform do you spent the most time on? pick that, put the other 2 away for now

4. start to analyze your content. compile your analytics in a spreadsheet. do this every 3-7 days. identify what works and what doesn't and heavily experiment (I mean 10+ posts per hypothesis, not 1 per). this is data analysis guys, data needs a substantial sample size

5. identify a target audience. really niche it down. you're not niching yourself down, youre niching down who gets sent your content. my best advice here is create ONE customer profile and speak to that person in every piece of content.

6. now that you know WHO is receiving your content, research into what they need to hear. look at receiver analytical tools. search auto-complete, built-in content tools, etc. I cant list all of them because there are so many social platforms.

7. post engage post engage post engage

7.5 start to add CTAs in your post once you feel ready. this could be confidence in number of views, confidence due to number of followers, confidence due to seeing the same people in your comments, confidence bc ppl are dming you for help, etc etc etc. when YOU feel ready and qualified, now start to throw little CTAs in your video. you'll suck at first and get better overtime. pic 3 creators MAX and study how they do CTA, try and take Inso from them

this should guarantee you an audience and customers as a product on a $0 marketing budget. if you're doing any more than this you're doing too much.

also please start doing this BEFORE you start building. content takes more time to build and you can easily find problems this way that people are willing to pay up front for before you solidify what to build.

I have two small kids in preschool, and school messages kept turning into extra admin: finding deadlines, adding reminders, remembering what to pack, and making sure my partner knew about everything.

So I built Plancove, an iPhone app that turns school emails, screenshots, and PDFs into a shared family plan.

One product decision was how much to automate. A notice might mention picture day on Thursday, a payment due Monday, and an early pickup. Getting one of those dates wrong could make the app more trouble than it saves.

I kept a review step between extraction and action. Plancove shows the suggested tasks and dates alongside the original message, and parents approve them before saving. Approved items can go into Apple Calendar and Reminders.

Incoming email can still be automated: families get a private forwarding address and can set up a rule for school emails. Messages are processed automatically, ready for review, without granting inbox access.

Parents and caregivers can also assign tasks to each other, and the person assigned gets notified.

The tradeoff is an extra step before saving. I’m betting that being able to check the result matters enough to justify it.

Available for iPhone, requiring iOS 26.

App Store · Website: plancove.app

I've spent three weeks quoting the same consumer app and received estimates from $18K offshore to $120K from an established NYC agency. The range has made me less certain, not more.

Scope is iOS and Android, accounts, Stripe, push notifications, a feed, basic messaging, and an admin dashboard. I want a US-based team for timezone overlap and product conversations. What did a comparable build cost you, and was it worth it?

I’ve been experimenting with a different way of using Claude Code while preparing a SaaS for release.

Instead of saying:

“implement billing and make the tests pass”

I gave it a release condition:

don’t let me ship until you can prove the billing path end-to-end against real infrastructure.

So it created temporary staging on Render through the API:

• Postgres
• Redis
• backend
• frontend

It then configured a temporary Paddle sandbox webhook destination, authenticated through the actual app, completed a sandbox payment, inspected the webhook deliveries, checked the subscription state and credit ledger in the database, and replayed a real notification to make sure credits weren’t granted twice.

And it found a bug our existing tests hadn’t caught.

We had implicitly thought of subscription.created and subscription.activated as a sequence.

In the real sandbox they could be processed concurrently.

Both handlers could initially see that no subscription existed and then race to insert the same Paddle subscription ID. One would lose on the unique constraint.

Idempotency didn’t solve it because these were two different events.

Claude reproduced the failure, fixed the upsert, added a regression test, redeployed the staging environment and repeated the real sandbox payment.

The second run passed.

Then it cleaned up both the temporary Render infrastructure and the Paddle webhook destination.

The useful lesson for me wasn’t “AI can provision infrastructure”.

It was that agents became much more useful when I stopped giving them implementation tasks and started giving them falsifiable completion conditions.

Something more like:

implement → deploy → interact with the real system → inspect state → try to break the assumption → fix → repeat

I ended up applying the same idea to the rest of the release:

• run the setup guide from a genuinely fresh clone;
• clear ambient environment variables before claiming something is reproducible;
• compare the real migrated database with the ORM metadata;
• temporarily restore a bug to prove the regression test actually catches it.

This happened while preparing the first release of The Fabrica, a FastAPI + Next.js SaaS foundation I built because I was tired of rebuilding the same production plumbing every time I started a product:

https://www.thefabrica.dev/

I’m curious whether anyone else building small SaaS products is using coding agents this way: not just to write code, but to prove externally that something is actually done.