Launch Directories Are a Grift That Sells Nothing to People Who Have Nothing

I paid BetaList $39 to list my new side project. Within hours, five other launch directories had emailed me to ask for more money. Congratulations to me, I had been discovered.

Why BetaList

I wanted a quick way to boost the search ranking of my new side project, QRpage. A launch directory gets you a backlink, and I remembered BetaList from back in the day. So I bought the $39 Lite plan and waited for a trickle of visitors.

What I got was email.

Five emails

PeerPush, LaunchNest, PostYourStartup, LaunchBuff and Shorebyte Lab. I'm not linking to any of them. They've had enough free backlinks.

Hey, I saw your startup on BetaList. Turning physical things into scannable websites is a smart move.

That was PostYourStartup. The flattery lasted exactly one sentence. Then came the offer: a free listing in exchange for a backlink. Nothing says "we love your product" like asking for something in the next breath.

I saw [my side project] on Betalist and believe it would work well on PeerPush.

Sure you do.

Still sitting on an unlaunched product?

That was LaunchNest. My side project had launched that day. It's the only reason they had my email address. Great research, guys.

Founders selling to founders

All five are basically the same site. Same pitch, same two prices ($19 and $39), and a free listing if you put their badge on your site.

AI has made launch directories trivial to build, so people build them. A new directory has no audience, so it watches a site that does, like BetaList, and emails every founder who shows up there. Nobody visiting these sites is looking for products, because nobody is visiting these sites. The founder is the customer.

The badge is the clever bit. It goes in your footer, which means it links back from every single page of your site. Get enough founders to do this and you end up with 1,000 to 2,000 referring domains and somewhere between 128,000 and a million backlinks. Your Domain Rating shoots up, and you wave that number at the next founder.

Then someone clones you. Shorebyte Lab's homepage is a word-for-word copy of a directory called SaaSCity, whose own site warns about "misleading clones". The clone emailed me anyway. Points for confidence.

What Ahrefs says

I looked all five up in Ahrefs. Domain Rating (DR) measures backlinks. Organic traffic measures actual humans.

Impressive ratings, practically no visitors. LaunchBuff is the runaway success here, with about six visitors a day. Some of them might be humans. Shorebyte Lab couldn't even manage a fake number.

These directories are worth nothing. You'd be paying $19 to put your product in front of nobody, which you can also do for free by not launching it.

Conclusion

AI made building things easy. It didn't give anyone a reason to build them. So people copy each other and sell the copies to other builders, who are hoping someone, somewhere, will finally look at their product.

PS: If you've built a launch directory, please don't email me.