The problem most startups face is the fragmentation of the venture capital market. Entrepreneurs go through quite a complicated path before their project becomes successful and attracts the interest of VCs. After all, large companies and specialized investors are interested in startups that are successful without their help, that have a basis in the form of a high-quality and interesting product, and are popular with users.
However, how do you attract attention and early adopters to your startup? Informing your target audience about your product is at the top of an entrepreneur's to-do list, once the MVP is released or the product is launched.
However, not every startup has the marketing budget and in-house expertise to launch an efficient promo campaign at early stages. Finding the right advertising channels can also be challenging and time-consuming. But you can easily and fruitfully promote your product or company by entering them into various popular listing platforms around the world. Getting on them means getting noticed by a large segment of your target audience. Especially for aspiring entrepreneurs and startup founders who are about to launch their project, we prepared the Top 10 best platforms to list your startup to gain more traction, traffic, early adopters and brand awareness.
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What Does a Startup Need to Know About Listing?
But first, let's understand why startup founders need to have the presence of their project on these platforms.
Drive Organic Traffic
Organic traffic. Your startup's site will be linked to from highly ranked sources, which will increase the authority of your domain, and therefore will be a higher position in the Google and Bing search results. More qualified backlinks means higher ranking is SERP.
In addition, if you have a good description of your startup (your product value, what problem it solves and what for you have started the project ), there is a good chance to get on the first 10 results for the low-frequency search queries (i.e. where users specify exact details what they are looking for). These SEO tricks will work forever and will not require any additional manual work from you.
Attract Attention
New launches from such sites often attract the attention of journalists, who write news about startups for specialized regional publications, for example in China, India or Latin America. Additional media coverage of your project will add to its attractiveness and attention as well as create a buzz around your startup.
Build Trustworthy Around Your Startup
The level of trust to your startup increases if you have many links and referrals from different sources. Your potential customers always study the startup's website, google any other information about, research your LinkedIn and/or Twitter profiles carefully before they decide to join/buy/etc; they also look at which portals news about your startup has been published and what journalists have written about you.
The number of pages mentioning your startup is an important factor in building trust with a potential client.
It's an excellent idea to place your startup on major platforms and directories for the zero-fee marketing promotional campaign. Let’s explore top-10 options:
Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a large-scale social media platform for startups, investors, venture funds, and job seekers who want to work in startups. Product Hunt's special feature is that the site allows users to post technology innovations and vote for their favorite projects, raising their positions in the rankings each day. Products are divided into four categories: technology products (including web apps, mobile apps, hardware), games (PC, Web, mobile apps), books, and podcasts. A startup simply needs a product name, URL and founder's details to create its card. The service is developing more as a startup community, a marketing and entertainment tool. Much of the functionality is devoted to competition — how to make a startup's card more visible than others.
Product Hunt is primarily aimed at promoting new products to an audience of nearly 6 million people. The platform's voting system can make a startup go viral and attract the attention of investors and potential customers. In addition, with Product Hunt, founders can generate additional traffic, get feedback from first users, test the product, attract international media attention, and even find VCs.
BetaList
BetaList is a very popular resource where beta versions of new products or just new startups are published. Its specifics are that only beta versions that have not been seen anywhere before are accepted.
The service only accepts applications from startups that have been recently launched, are in beta testing and have not been launched on other sites. It can take about 2 months from review to publication of a startup on the platform. For those who don't want to wait, there is a paid option.
Every day 3-6 new startups are posted on the platform, classified into one of 290 categories. This makes project selection much easier. Monthly traffic to the platform is over 125,000 visitors. Members of this site include early users, bloggers, investors and journalists. As a result, a founder can get feedback on his or her startup from a community of experts or investment from interested VCs.
Like Product Hunt, Betalist helps users get early access to early-stage startups. The site lets users sort and select startups by topic and interest. The platform is updated daily.
AppSumo
AppSumo is a platform that helps founders test their product and make their first sales. AppSumo features startups that are willing to sell their products at a price several times lower than planned for 2 weeks. Usually the price is reduced by 50-90% compared to the planned selling price. This allows them to attract quite a few first-time buyers.
Startup founders can easily contact AppSumo platform users and get feedback from them. This platform allows you to sell software, online courses, WP plugins, a template library, Chrome extensions, stock photos and videos, design elements and apps.
Only interesting startups from AppSumo's point of view can get through to the site.
The platform has over 860,000 monthly visitors. The main audience of the service is professionals, investors and startup owners.
Indie Hackers
Indie Hackers is a platform where startup founders share their stories, knowledge, and experiences. The site allows entrepreneurs to ask for help and advice from other business owners. The platform has more than 930,000 monthly visitors.
This site can be called a big startup community, where you can not only create a profile of your project, but also update it with news — post some news with dates, publish posts and links in different subgroups and generate additional traffic to your site. When news about your project is updated, it will be mentioned on the main product page until it is displaced by news about other startups.
Developers can also use this site to discuss ideas, find a partner or attract customers for your product.
Despite easy registration and the ability to get traffic on Indie Hackers, the platform has a downside: the audience might not be quite relevant to each project to get the results you want.
Hacker News
Hacker News is a social platform for startups with over 200 thousand subscribers. The main focus of the site is on news content: here entrepreneurs can talk about their startup, share their experience and knowledge. The platform differs from other social news portals in that there is no opportunity to «downgrade» materials, and newcomers can either give a plus to an article they like or not vote at all. In general, the content that can be featured on Hacker News is defined by the phrase «anything that pleases your intellectual curiosity».
However, when posting to Hacker News, it's worth bearing in mind that the platform's rules do not accept any self-promotion: entrepreneurs can post entrepreneurial stories and educational content.
For aspiring founders, you should pay attention to the Show thread, the essence of which is that people share their products and want to get feedback from community members. In addition to the Show thread, your material also gets into the main news thread, which increases the likelihood of being seen.
Hacker News can be considered a good branding site that allows you to promote your startup by presenting technical and educational news.
Rugless
Rugless is a new platform created for reviews and feedback on Web3 projects and designed to provide transparency to the industry. For developers and startup founders, it comes in handy if they already have customers who have tried the company's product or service. This is a strong tool for promoting your startup — after all, as you know, there is nothing better for aspiring entrepreneurs than positive feedback or constructive criticism.
The Rugless platform aims to create the first extensive library of feedback on projects, thereby helping people make more informed decisions when buying certain company assets. In addition, on the platform users will be able to receive tokens for the reviews left — it will be an additional element of incentive for customers to write a review on your project.
For now the platform is at the stage of initial development, and its developers already have many far-reaching plans. Unfortunately, Rugless has no other useful tools or databases for startups, so it can only be used as a means for additional advertising and reputation building.
StackSocial
The StackSocial platform was launched around the same time as AppSumo, and was supposed to be developed as a platform for helping startups engaged in SaaS solutions. However, over time, the service has expanded its range of interaction with various companies and now seeks to help many tech startups engaged not only in cloud computing, but also the production of physical products (gadgets, home appliances, and the like).
The developers of StackSocial say the platform has generated more than $50 million in revenue for customers, saved visitors more than $1.5 billion and posted more than four million deals since its inception.
Hundreds of different projects are now available on StackSocial and it's now essentially a full-fledged e-commerce platform with discounts on everything from car equipment to fashion accessories.
Startup founders can use StackSocial as a platform to draw attention to their project through beta testing or early product sales.
Crunchbase
One of the first and best-known online platforms in the world with a universal directory for finding business information about all private companies. On Crunchbase you can create a company profile, which displays the name, industry, business description, IPO status, total amount of financing, founders, contacts, social network accounts and other information. The confirmation of the authenticity of the organization is obligatory, the purpose of which is to convince investors, partners, potential clients in the reliability of the company. In addition, Crunchbase can be used as a resource to get insight into your competitors, get information about funding, information about founders and key participants, and discover many new startups.
An interesting feature of the platform is the ability to edit not only your own, but also other profiles.
Crunchbase contains data from more than 1 million companies (startups, technology corporations) and 200,000 investors.
However, the platform lacks information on educational programs and acceleration centers, and there is no possibility to obtain information on corporate requests for innovations.
F6S
An international aggregator of acceleration programs, services and events for startups. The platform was created to enable startup founders to interact with investors, as well as to find various incubators and tools useful for developers. In addition, through F6S you can look for various professionals to work together on projects.
According to public data, F6S has more than 11,000 startups, for which the platform offers access to an extensive database of investors, educational programs and acceleration centers. It is also a platform for a large community of entrepreneurs, which periodically holds pitch sessions for VCs. Besides that, F6S allows investors and startups to talk to each other. Monthly traffic to the platform exceeds 700,000 visitors.
InnMind
InnMind is one of the leading listing platforms helping early-stage Web3 and blockchain startups find venture capitalists.
InnMind is a platform where the touchpoints between startups, investors and service providers are established. It includes comprehensive B2B2C solutions and includes an extensive online database of innovative startups, an online venture investor hub, as well as a knowledge base with comprehensive information for founders and the Perks Club, a great set of tools and services that InnMind customers can use at great prices. In addition, InnMind constantly talks about startups on its Twitter and Linkedin profiles, and includes information about them in its weekly email newsletters.
More than 120 active venture capitalists are represented on the platform, and the site has an audience of more than 30,000 subscribers. In addition, the InnMind team regularly holds pitching sessions — online meetings between startup founders and investors, where entrepreneurs present their projects. Between 2021 and 2022, the platform helped close more than 230 deals between entrepreneurs and investors totaling $45,000,000, and continues to support startups creating products in cryptocurrency, blockchain, DeFi, GameFi, Metaverse and infrastructure.
Unlike the above-mentioned listing platforms, InnMind helps startups attract investments — thanks to the extensive database, functionality and regular pitching sessions startup founders have a real chance to get funding from VCs.
Building brand awareness and product familiarity are top priorities for aspiring entrepreneurs and product developers. Including them in your marketing strategy means you're on the right track to get your users the attention they want.
In addition to the platforms mentioned in this article, there are various other sites for spreading news about product launches. Regardless of which site you choose, be sure to use digital marketing tools to get more exposure to your audience.
If you want to learn more about great listing platforms or startup promotion strategies, subscribe to our Twitter, Linkedin, and YouTube profiles, and join the Telegram group.
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Mazikov Nikita
Mazikov Nikita
Val Baev
Mazikov Nikita
Val Baev
