So 2023 was going to be the year I would finally go all in on the marketing and promoting Keenforms, my SaaS form builder plus no code rules engine side project. There are dozens of web pages and public google sheets documenting all the places you can submit your startup to. The plan was to put all these lists together, and submit Keenforms to each one.
Product Hunt and Hacker News are obvious choices, however there are hundreds of others I wasn't familiar with. I scraped all these sites into a single csv file, weeded out the duplicates, then worked on submiting to each one.
After attempting to submit to the first 25 or so sites I started to have a realization; most of these lists were packed with garbage. Maybe I shouldn't expect too much from someone who threw all the links into a google doc or notion template months or even years ago. However even a reputable site like IndieHacker has a page with multiple broken or invalid listings. A summmary of the problems I uncovered;
While the domains for sale and application errors were disappointing, at least it didn't waste much time with them.
More time consuming were the sites that still had a submission form that you would not know were broken till you clicked submit (i.e. Getworm). So many tech and startup blogs that had not posted anything in 2 years. Websites that were really meant for brick and mortar businesses, not a web based SaaS. Sites charging a lot of money to list your startup with no verifiable traffic. Search engines not named google. A tell tale sign of abandonment were sites that still had google plus links. My least favorite were the news websites focused on startups that had no clear or obvious way to submit to. Many of these lists included sites that you could not submit to, but you could contribute content or worse, you could pay to advertise on. Keenforms is bootstrapped, we're not paying for anything except to keep the servers running.
Then there were also some good sites that might be perfect for launching if only my SaaS was in the right physical location or business category. Lots of sites dedicated to gaming and mobile apps. Arctic Startup is perfect, but they focus on startups in Nordic and Baltic countries - Keenforms was built in Chicago, Illinois.
After going through all these sites I realized there was a lot of value to all the information I learned, and I should share my findings with others who might be interested. So I did what any coder who doesn't want to market but would rather write code - I bought yet another domain name and then created a new project with a database of all the sites.
A big thank you to all the places I scraped data, your efforts were not in vain!