You shipped something. The domain is a few days old, nothing links to it, and every article about backlinks is either written for a site that already ranks or is trying to sell you a package. This is the other thing: a short, ordered list of what a founder with no budget can actually do in the first week.
Before any of it, one honest paragraph.
What this is worth, and what it isn't
Directory backlinks are a modest, real input. They are not a growth strategy.
What a handful of low-authority links genuinely does for a new domain: it gives crawlers a path to your site, which usually gets you indexed sooner than waiting would. It puts a plain-English description of your product on pages other people occasionally read, which sends a trickle of referral traffic. It gives you a bit of anchor-text variety that isn't your brand name.
What it does not do is move rankings on its own. If someone tells you a week of directory submissions will rank a new SaaS, they are selling something. The sites that win on search win on the product and the pages, and links follow that rather than substitute for it.
Also: do not set a target authority score. Chasing a number from a third-party tool optimises for the tool, not for search, and it is why so much of this advice ends in paid link packages. Judge a directory on whether real people use it and whether the link is dofollow — both of which you can check in a minute.
Here is the week.
| Day | What you do | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| One | Fill in the link fields you already own | Instant, no permission needed |
| Two | Submit to directories that are free and verified dofollow | A day's work, live within weeks |
| Three | Install one badge row, submit to the badge-gated set | Seven more, on a clear trade |
| Four | Stop, and go back to the product | — |
Day one: the links only you can give yourself
Start here, because none of it requires anyone's approval and most of it takes under an hour.
Your GitHub repo. The homepage field on a repository — the little "Website" box at the top right — is a link to your domain. If you have any public repo, an SDK, a CLI, a config example, that field is probably empty. Fill it in. Your GitHub profile has the same field.
Your maker profiles. Anywhere you already have an account with a bio and a website field: your personal site, your existing social profiles, the profile on whatever community you are already part of. These take minutes and you are not asking anyone for anything.
A listing you control. Indie Hackers lets you post a product with a free account, instantly, and we confirmed the outbound link there is dofollow. Product Hunt is free and self-serve too, though it works as a launch day rather than a link — pick the date deliberately rather than burning it on day one of this list.
A post, written for humans. A Show HN, or a post in a subreddit where your product is genuinely on topic. Read the rules first; a link dropped into a community that didn't ask for it costs you more than it earns. Written well, these send the only traffic on this page that converts.
That is day one. Nothing here is a trick, nothing costs money, and it is the highest-yield hour of the week.
Day two: free, and verified dofollow
Now the directories. The trap is that almost every "best directories" list asserts dofollow with no evidence, and a directory can change its link policy in an afternoon.
So we checked ourselves. Across 104 directories we track, a script fetched a
real listing page and read the rel attribute on the outbound link: 39
confirmed dofollow, 3 confirmed nofollow, 19 that blocked the checker with a 403
or a rate limit, and 43 we have not yet reached. Saying this plainly, once:
unverified means we could not confirm it, not that the link is bad. Several
of the blocked ones are very likely dofollow and worth submitting to. We just
won't put a tick next to something we didn't see.
Of the 39 confirmed dofollow, a small group is both free with no paid tier and open to a self-serve submission. That is your day-two list: AICyclopedia, AIToolMall, Future Tools, Insidr AI, Startup Stash and ToolHunt. Most review manually, so expect a wait rather than a same-day listing, and a couple are editorial enough that acceptance is not guaranteed. Startups.fyi belongs in the same group but is curated with no public submit form, so it is not something you can action.
Six is a smaller number than the listicles promise, and that is the point. The live, filtered version is at free and dofollow, and the full findings — including which directories block automated checks and why — are in our writeup of all 104.
Write the submission once. A one-line tagline, a paragraph, a logo, a screenshot, a category. Every form asks for the same six things, and having them in a text file turns an afternoon into an hour.
The free list is short because free tiers have been closing across this market. Uneed shut its free queue entirely and is paid-only today. BetaList has no free path at all. OpenHunts still has a free tier with a long queue, Open Launch books its free slots weeks ahead, and StartupBase queues free listings roughly four to five weeks out. Articles from 2024 that list all of these as free are not lying on purpose; they just haven't looked recently.
Day three: the badge trade
The pattern that replaced the free-for-all is the reciprocal badge. You install a small badge linking to the directory, they verify it, and you get a free listing with a dofollow link.
Seven directories in our index run some version of this and are confirmed dofollow: Fazier, Twelve Tools, TheSaaSDir, TheAIToolsDir, LaunchIgniter, StartupBase and Smol Launch. A related case: ScrollLaunch is explicit that your link stays dofollow only while its badge is installed.
Be clear-eyed about the trade. You give a link to get a link, and the badge is visible on your own pages, pointing outward. The logic on their side is sound — a directory handing free dofollow links to anyone with a form gets scraped and spammed into worthlessness, and a badge is a cost the spammer won't pay. But the trade only works in your favour a limited number of times. One or two badges in a footer reads as normal. A wall of eleven reads as exactly what it is.
The practical trick is batching. Do all the badge installs as a single footer row in one sitting — one component, one deploy — rather than one at a time over a fortnight as each submission comes back. The work is nearly identical for one badge or seven; it is the context-switching that eats the day.
We run the same shape here. LetsLaunch is free, has no queue, and lists your product the same day; the dofollow link is earned by putting our badge on your site rather than bought. If that fits, you can submit a product alongside the rest of day three.
What to skip
"Submit to 100+ directories for $99." The catalogue those services work from is usually free to browse. What the money buys is roughly thirty submissions of labour — not nine hundred links, and not links at all where the directory rejects you. The lists also get padded: open one and you will find dead domains and sites that are not directories in any sense. Paying someone for an afternoon of form-filling is legitimate; just price it as that.
Cold email off a scraped list. Mailing two hundred strangers asking for a link has a response rate near zero and burns the sending reputation you will want later for actual product email.
PBNs and link networks. Paying for links from sites that exist to sell links is the thing search engines built entire systems to detect.
Anything promising a specific authority number. The number is a third-party estimate, the promise is unfalsifiable until you've paid, and the only way to move it quickly is the previous bullet.
Check any claim yourself
Thirty seconds, no tools. Open a real listing on the directory — a free one,
not a featured one, since some sites mark them differently. Find the button that
goes to that product's own website, right-click it and choose Inspect, and read
the rel attribute on the anchor. nofollow, sponsored or ugc means the
link passes nothing. No rel at all, or only noopener noreferrer, means
dofollow.
Do this before you pay any directory, and again a few months after you are listed, because policies change quietly. It is faster than reading a listicle and it is the only evidence that counts.
The honest summary
Day one is free and instant and you should do all of it today. Day two is six submissions. Day three is one footer row and seven more. That is the whole realistic yield of a week with no budget, and it is worth doing once — for the crawl paths and the trickle of traffic, not because it will rank you.
Then close the tab and go back to the product, which is the part that actually compounds.