Launching Is Not One Day

Guest post by Will Ballentine, who builds IndieAscent.

Launching is sold as a day. In practice it is twenty afternoons: a Show HN, a dozen directories, a newsletter swap, a podcast, spread over weeks. Every one asks for the same things in a slightly different box, and by the fourth you are rewriting your tagline from memory because you cannot remember what you told the third.

Then the afternoons stop, and something quieter starts. The listings you made carry on existing without you. Some send visitors. Some link back to you and some do not. Some quietly stop existing. From where you stand they all look identical to the day you made them.

I launched my own product onto eleven directories a few weeks ago and got most of this wrong. Here is the version I would hand to myself before starting.

Write every answer once, before you open a single form

Almost every submission form asks for the same nine or ten things. Put them in one document first:

• The product name, exactly as it should appear
• A tagline at 60 characters, another at 80, another at 160
• A short description, roughly a paragraph
• A long description, in plain text with the formatting stripped
• Your URL and the handle you want credited
• A square logo, and at least one wide screenshot of the product doing its job

The lengths matter more than they look. A field that truncates at 60 will cut your sentence mid-word and you will not notice until it is public. Writing the short version deliberately beats letting a form choose where your pitch ends.

With that document open in another tab, a submission takes three minutes instead of fifteen, and the twentieth listing says the same thing about your product as the first.

Do them in the right order

Directories do not all cost the same to submit to. Some want an account before they will show you the form. Some want screenshots at particular dimensions. Some approve in a day, others in a fortnight.

Group them: the ones you can do cold, the ones needing an account, and the ones needing assets you have not made yet. Do the cold ones first, while your energy is high. You will get further in an afternoon than if you hit a signup wall on the second submission and lose twenty minutes to it.

Post a link you can measure

This is the one I would most want to go back and change.

Every form asks for your product URL and almost everyone pastes the plain one. Post a tagged URL instead, so that when somebody arrives and signs up you can tell which of the twenty sent them.

You cannot add this afterwards. A plain URL posted today cannot be attributed tomorrow unless the directory lets you edit the listing, and many do not. It costs nothing at submission time and it is the difference between knowing your launch worked and believing it did.

Check what actually happened

This is the part nobody does, and it is where the surprises were.

Of the first eight listings I checked, four link back to my domain with a dofollow link. The rest either use nofollow or do not link back at all. That is not a scandal and it does not make those directories bad; plenty nofollow by policy and say so. The problem was that I did not know, and before checking I would have told you all eleven were backlinks.

You can check this yourself in about a minute per listing. Open your listing, view source, and search the page for your domain. If it is not there, the page does not link to you. If it is, look at the rel attribute on that anchor. No nofollow means the link counts.

Two things worth knowing before you draw conclusions from what you find.

Some links are real but invisible. Three of the eighteen pages I fetched had no links in them whatsoever, on pages that show a full listing in a browser. Those sites build their pages with JavaScript, so the HTML that arrives is an empty shell and the links appear only once the browser runs the code. Google renders JavaScript and will usually see them. Many other crawlers do not, and neither do several of the backlink tools founders use to check their own work.

A listing in review is not a listing. One directory came back showing no link to me at all. Before saying anything about it I checked a few of their other listings, and every live one had a dofollow link. Mine did not, because mine was still awaiting approval. An unapproved listing and an ungenerous directory look identical from outside. Do not count a placement until it is live, and if a directory looks like it is stiffing you, check somebody else's listing there first.

The part that never ends

Listings do not stay put. Directories prune, sites get redesigned, links get dropped in a template change. Nothing about that reaches you. The listing you remember making still feels live, right up until you click it.

So the honest version of launch advice is not a checklist you complete. It is a record you keep, and a habit of looking at it: once a quarter, walk your own listings and see which are still standing and which quietly went away. The afternoon you spent submitting is only worth what those listings are still doing six months later.

What I built, since you asked

That habit is what I could not keep by hand, so I built IndieAscent↗ (opens in a new tab) to keep it for me.

You track a product and it becomes one dated log of every place you have put it. A crawler rechecks each placement, tells you when a listing dies, and reads whether a directory links back to you and whether that link is dofollow. There is a catalog of directories with what each one asks for, read off real listings rather than copied from anybody's list, and a submission pack that holds every tagline and description length so you write them once. Every entry can carry a tagged link, so a placement can report which signups it produced.

It is free for one product, with no card and no trial, and the log begins by reading your own site for the directory badges you have already collected, so it usually starts with something in it rather than a blank page. If you have launched in the last year and cannot say what your listings are doing now, start one↗ (opens in a new tab).