How to submit your SaaS to directories
Directory submission is boring, mechanical and genuinely worth doing. Here is how to get through the useful ones without losing a weekend.
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- SpacerrApps
- Published
- Reading time
- 4 min read
Submitting a SaaS product to directories is one of the few growth tasks where the work is entirely mechanical and the payoff is real. It is also where founders lose entire weekends, because the lists floating around have three hundred entries and no ranking.
Here is the version that takes an afternoon.
Prepare the kit first, submit second
The reason a submission session takes eight hours instead of three is that every form asks for something you have not written yet. Write all of it once, into one document, before you open a single submission page.
| Field | Note |
|---|---|
| Name | On its own, with no tagline attached |
| Tagline | Under 60 characters, says what it does |
| Short description | 150 to 300 characters |
| Long description | 500 to 1,500 characters, no headings |
| Icon | 512 by 512 PNG, square, no rounding |
| Screenshots | 3 to 5 at one size, the product working |
| Categories | Two or three, from their list |
| Pricing | A number. "Contact us" gets ignored |
| Founded, team size, location | Crunchbase-style directories ask |
Write the long description in plain sentences. Half these listings are read by an AI answer engine before they are read by a person, and prose describing what the product does is what those engines can actually use.
The twenty worth doing
Split into three tiers by what they return.
Tier one, do these first. Product Hunt, AlternativeTo, SaaSHub, G2, Capterra, Crunchbase. Six submissions, roughly ninety minutes, and between them they cover launch traffic, switching intent, buyer intent and the corporate record.
Tier two, the indie layer. Uneed, BetaList, DevHunt, Indie Hackers, Peerlist, SideProjectors, Microlaunch, StartupBase. Smaller audiences, easier to be visible in, and every one of them is a followed link on a page with a real editorial standard.
Tier three, the ones that write about you. Directories that publish an article about each listing rather than a grid tile. There are not many, which is precisely why they are worth the form. This site is one: submit your app and it gets a page plus a written piece, both followed, free.
The ten that repay the hour, ranked, are in the best directories to submit your app.
Anything beyond those twenty is optional and most of it is noise. If a directory's homepage is a wall of outbound links with no prose, it is a link farm, and a link from it is worth less than nothing.
Every one of those fields, with the limits that get a submission rejected, is in the directory submission checklist.
Do it over three weeks, not one night
Two reasons, and the second one matters more.
The obvious one: the useful directories review submissions by hand and a rejection costs you the slot for a month. Rushing produces rejections.
The real one: a hundred identical listings appearing across the web in one night is the exact footprint of an automated link campaign, because that is what it is. Ten a day, in a different order each time, with the description reworded rather than pasted, looks like a founder doing their own marketing. That is what you want it to look like, because that is what it is.
Write the description differently each time
Not because anybody checks, but because identical text on twenty pages gives a search engine one paragraph to work with instead of twenty. Keep the first sentence and rewrite the rest. Lead with the integration on the directory about integrations, lead with the price on the one people use to compare prices.
It costs about four minutes per listing and it is the single highest-return habit in this whole process.
Track what you submitted
A spreadsheet with four columns: directory, date submitted, status, and whether the link is followed. Without it you will resubmit to the same three sites in six months and forget the twelve that approved you.
Check the followed column by opening your live listing, viewing the source and looking at the rel attribute on your URL. Directories change this policy quietly and it is worth knowing which of your listings quietly stopped counting.
What good looks like a quarter later
Twenty listings, sixteen approved, maybe eleven of them followed. A few hundred visits a month in total, most from two or three of them, and a domain that now has enough authority for your own pages to start ranking for the long-tail queries you wrote them for.
That is the actual outcome. Anybody promising more from directory submission is selling a package of link-farm entries.
Start with the one that leaves a real page behind. Submit your SaaS and we will write it up, or read what a listing includes first.