Original Summary

So… 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. 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: PeerPush, LaunchNest, PostYourStartup, LaunchBuff and Shorebyte Lab. I'm not linking to any of them. They've had enough free backlinks. 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 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. 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. 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.   submitted by   /u/caspii2 [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：开源项目与落地
  • 分类依据：内容涉及项目实践、创业、副业或变现
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/10/17 14:27:29