Where to launch a startup: venues, kit and sequencing

A launch is a sequence, not a day

The popular image of a launch is a single day when everything goes live and traffic arrives all at once. In practice, a single launch day mostly produces a spike that fades within days, and if your onboarding has a problem you discover it in front of the largest audience you will have for months.

A better model is a launch season: several weeks in which you appear in a series of venues, each with a different audience and a different format. Early, smaller launches let you fix problems and refine your message. Later, larger ones benefit from the reviews, testimonials and polish you gathered along the way.

It also helps to separate two goals that often get mixed up. Some venues are good for first users and feedback. Others are good for lasting discovery, because people search them months later. Plan for both.

The categories of launch venue

The named platforms are examples of each category, not endorsements, and their rules, formats and audiences change over time. Read each venue's current guidelines before you post. AltFTool keeps a maintained list of launch sites, directories and communities on the backlinks page, with a dedicated launch category, which is a reasonable starting point for building your own shortlist.

Prepare a launch kit once

Every venue asks for roughly the same material in slightly different shapes. Writing it once, carefully, saves hours and keeps your message consistent. Store it in a single document you can copy from.

• Name and one-line description — Under about ten words, saying what it does and for whom, with no jargon.
• Short and long descriptions — Versions of roughly 50 and 200 words, written in the language customers use for the problem.
• Screenshots and a short demo — Three to five clear screenshots and a demo video of a minute or two showing the core job end to end.
• Logo and images — Your logo in square and wide formats, on light and dark backgrounds.
• Founder story — A few honest sentences on why you built it. Communities respond to this far more than to feature lists.
• Pricing and offer — Clear pricing, and optionally a launch offer with a real end date.
• Answers to likely questions — Privacy, data handling, how it differs from the obvious alternative, what is on the roadmap.
• Tracking — A way to see which venue each visitor came from, such as tagged links.

Sequence the launches over weeks

An example sequence, adjust to your situation: in the first week, tell your own audience and existing customers, and ask for honest feedback rather than upvotes. In the second, post in two or three niche communities where you are already a known contributor. In the third, submit to a batch of startup directories and review sites, and ask early customers if they would leave a review. Around the fourth or fifth week, once onboarding is smooth and you have some testimonials, do a launch on a larger product platform and pitch relevant newsletters.

Between each step, fix what broke. Read every comment, reply to every question and note the objections that come up more than once. Those objections are the most useful output of a launch, because they tell you what your landing page and onboarding are not yet saying.

Do not ask people to upvote or review on any platform in ways its rules forbid. Most launch platforms penalise vote manipulation, and communities notice coordinated behaviour quickly. Asking people to have a look and share honest feedback is fine; asking for votes in bulk is not.

How launches earn legitimate backlinks

A listing on a reputable directory, review site or launch platform usually includes a link to your site. Those links help people discover you, and because they come from relevant, established sites, they can also help search engines understand what you do. That is a genuine side benefit of launching widely.

Keep it legitimate. Prefer venues with real editorial standards and real visitors over sites that exist only to sell links. Do not pay for link schemes or mass submission services that post you to hundreds of low-quality directories; at best they waste money and at worst they can harm how search engines treat your site. A modest number of relevant listings is worth more than a large number of irrelevant ones.

Keep your listings accurate after launch. Update descriptions, screenshots and pricing when they change, so the listing keeps working as a discovery channel long after launch week.

Measure what each venue actually did

A venue that sends a large spike of curious visitors and no customers may still have been worth it for feedback, but it is not a channel to repeat. A small niche community that produces three paying customers may be your best channel for the next six months.

• Visitors — Useful only as a starting point.
• Sign-ups or trials — Shows whether the audience matched the problem.
• Activated users — People who completed the core action at least once.
• Paying customers — The only number that pays for anything.
• Qualitative feedback — The objections and questions, which often matter more than the counts.

Questions