Editorial disclosure: Kakunin has no financial, affiliate, or partnership relationship with Nick Launches. It is mentioned here as a relevant resource for founders planning a startup launch, not as sponsored or paid content.
The Volume Problem With Launch Directories
Every early-stage founder eventually runs into the same piece of advice: submit your product to launch directories. It's cheap, it's straightforward, and each listing is a potential backlink and a trickle of discovery traffic. The problem shows up once you actually try to do it — there isn't one directory, there are hundreds, and most submission forms ask for slightly different fields, slightly different formatting, and an account you didn't have five minutes ago.
Nick Launches' directory of 192 platforms is a useful illustration of the scale of the problem, not just a list. The page itself is built like a tracker rather than a static article — a visible progress bar, and a status you set per directory (Done, Skip) as you work through the list. That framing matters more than it sounds: it turns an open-ended, easy-to-abandon task into something with a visible finish line, which is most of the reason these submission projects stall out in practice.
Domain Rating Is the Only Number That Matters
Not all 192 listings are worth the same 15 minutes. A backlink from a directory with real authority behaves completely differently, in Google's eyes, from a backlink on a domain nobody links to. Domain Rating (DR) is the standard proxy for that authority — a 0-100 score based on the quantity and quality of a site's own backlink profile — and it's the number worth sorting by before you submit anywhere.
The directory ranks all 192 platforms by exactly this: DR and link type (whether the link is dofollow, which passes SEO value, or nofollow, which mostly doesn't). At the top of that list sit genuine internet-scale platforms — SourceForge and Hacker News both sit in the low 90s DR-wise — while the bottom of the list includes newer, unproven entrants like PublishYourSaaS, currently at DR 0. Submitting to both takes the same five minutes. The SEO return on those five minutes is not remotely the same.
Automating the Submission Grind
The actual bottleneck in a 192-directory submission run is rarely deciding where to submit — it's the repetitive data entry. Product name, one-line tagline, a longer description, your logo, your URL, over and over, with each site's form laid out slightly differently. Nick Launches addresses this directly with an "NL Launch Companion" browser extension that autofills your product's name, tagline, and links as you move from form to form, which is the difference between a submission run taking an afternoon versus a week.
Niche-Specific Directories for Agent and Dev-Tool Startups
General "submit your startup here" lists are a decent starting point, but they put a consumer app and an infrastructure API in the same bucket, which rarely serves either well. The more useful filtering happens at the category level, and this is where a directory aimed at a technical audience earns its place over a generic one: dedicated categories for "Agents" and "Dev Tools" put an AI agent product in front of the people actually building with agents, rather than burying it in a general software list.
For anyone building in the agent-infrastructure space — identity, tooling, orchestration, evaluation — that category-level targeting is worth more than an extra dozen generic, low-DR listings.
Quality Beats Quantity — the DR 40+ Rule
The most useful part of the resource isn't the list itself — it's the caveat attached to it. The directory's own FAQ is upfront that having 192 options doesn't mean you should use all 192: it recommends founders focus primarily on directories with a Domain Authority of 40 or higher if the actual goal is moving the needle on SEO, rather than treating the exercise as a volume game.
That's a useful discipline to import wholesale into any launch checklist. A morning spent on 15 well-chosen, high-DR submissions will typically outperform a week spent grinding through all 192 — the long tail below DR 40 mostly buys you a listing, not meaningfully more search visibility.
Try It Yourself
If you're planning a launch and haven't mapped out which directories are actually worth the submission time, Nick Launches' directory of 192 platforms is a reasonable place to start the audit — sort by DR, skip the bottom half unless you have time to burn, and prioritize whatever niche category matches what you've actually built.