Does Submitting to Launch Directories Actually Work?

On 6 August 2026, Indie Hackers (opens in a new tab) published the story of Sergiu Chiriac, a solo founder who built himself a tool for submitting his own products to startup directories, then turned it into a business on top of the tool: AI Directories now brings in roughly $9.5k of his $10-15k monthly portfolio revenue, more than any single product he's actually shipped, and over 900 founders have paid him to do what he used to do for free, for himself.

That’s an incredible result for a distribution channel most founders treat as a launch-day checkbox. So I looked at what directory submission is actually worth.

What directories actually deliver

Directory submission won't build an audience by itself: it produces a backlink, a trickle of early qualified traffic, and, on Chiriac's own numbers, enough underlying demand that a curation service built around the submission process alone clears $9.5k a month.

The traffic numbers vary by platform. Per a 2026 roundup of Product Hunt launch data (opens in a new tab), top-performing launches convert 15-25% of visitors into signups, while typical results are closer to 2-4% for consumer tools and 1-2% for B2B; BetaList's own launch guide (opens in a new tab) claims a steadier 15-20% visitor-to-signup rate at $0.50-$1.40 per signup, against Product Hunt's more typical 1-3%, though that number comes from a directory-adjacent blog with an obvious interest in making directories look good. The more interesting tactic here is spreading the bet: products listed across three or more complementary platforms see 2.8 times the total traffic of a Product Hunt-only launch.

Where the "just do SEO" case comes from

I can see the argument for skipping directories entirely and putting the same hours into content and search instead. A directory listing decays fast: most of the traffic arrives in the first 48 hours and drops off a cliff after that, and the backlink's SEO value, real but slow, arrives at a moment when a link's downstream payoff is getting less certain by the month. Ahrefs' own analysis (opens in a new tab) of 300,000 keywords found that an AI Overview on the results page now cuts the top-ranking result's click-through rate by 58%, up from a 34.5% decline eight months earlier. Ranking well, even with directory-boosted authority, increasingly means nothing gets clicked at all.

Under that argument, the hours Chiriac spent researching and submitting to a hundred directories would have compounded harder as a piece of cornerstone content that ranks, or gets cited, for years.

What I think

I think this tactic is right if you're optimizing for the traffic. It's wrong if you're optimizing for what Chiriac actually used the process for, which was proof: he became his own first customer, and every time he launched a new product, submitting it to directories was how he found out fast whether anyone cared. The revenue came later, once other founders wanted the same shortcut he'd built for himself. And honestly, these internal tool pivots are some of the biggest kind of success stories I’ve seen recently.

A directory submission is a forcing function: it puts a product in front of strangers within days instead of months, for almost no cost beyond the hours it takes. Whether that traffic compounds into anything is close to irrelevant if the real question is whether to keep building at all.

The final q

What we can't answer yet is whether directory traffic compounds into anything without a content or SEO layer sitting underneath it, or whether the value caps out at one modest hit per product no matter how many directories you use. Chiriac's own long-term bet is on SEO and GEO (smart), which is probably the tell: he's using directories the way he did on day one, as a fast way to find out whether a product is worth the content investment that comes after.