I know these type of lists exist elsewhere. But I wanted to list some of the sites that I know where you can quite easily submit your project to get the word out initially.
I like your marketing approach - post a list and include your project https://www.sideprojectors.com right in the middle. Wouldn't it be fair to disclose such a thing?
Why? OP gave you a list and a fairly non bias summary for each. Besides, using their site is completely optional and based on volunteerism. If you think it was of poor character, don't use their site.
Is mentioning they run the site necessary? Absolutely not IMO.
I thought it was obvious at first glance he'd be promoting his own site anyway; his username is 'sideproject'.
Personally I think it beats Show HN: Sideprojectors, which was his alternative. I saved the list in my notes. Thread was useful to me and good advertising for him. Win-Win.
I literally* don't understand how people mess this up. If you were talking about a list of projects that had not yet been submitted to one of those lists, would you say they are "non-submit"? No, obviously you would say "non-submitted". If you were talking about books that had been printed by a publisher, would you say they are "publish"? No, you would say "published", because it's a past participle, and that is how we say past participles in English. This is not a prescriptive/descriptive thing: every English speaker over the age of 5 talks this way. But for some reason "bias", a completely normal verb, causes people to throw out everything they know about English.
People get this wrong because with many accents (most American regions among them) the "ed" in "biased" is almost silent when spoken aloud at conversational tempo.
I consider lip-movement during reading a mental disorder. It means your cerebral cortex is connected to your motor cortex in a flawed way. It's a significant 'brain wiring' issue, and would severely limit how fast one can read as well. It's not as bad as "mouth breathers" but close.
"Thanks for linking to our sites, sideproject! As agreed, we'll get back to you later ... " Just kidding, but this list could be a Trojan horse. Probably not, but I think ANY connection should be mentioned. To NOT mention a connection is worse than the proverbial "fine print." What you didn't read the fine print?
Ugh, I'm not a fan of the idea of a whole bunch of people spamming crunchbase and angel.co with a side project that goes nowhere. It will make crunchbase useless as the dead links and dead projects pile up like so many abandoned github projects.
Oh sorry downvoters for quashing your dreams of wealth and fame with your bootstrap styled 10 hour project consisting of largely code copy and pasted from stackoverflow that will revolutionize everything everywhere. Yes please submit that to all the places. We all want to try it out.
Holy crap. I know that HN is all about issuing poisonous put-downs towards people who make things, but seldomly have I been reminded of that with such an artfully distilled piece of bile.
Something is deeply wrong with this community. Not everyone was born with 10 famous startups and 10k Twitter followers under their belt, but things can and do change.
And no, I'm not in favor of spamming indices, either.
It's not HN, it's (am I really about to type this?) hacker culture. It's antagonistic and adversarial; I personally thrive in an environment where I get told to eat shit and die if I ask a question I could have found the answer to on Google.
You're fighting nearly 30 years of tradition - don't bother. Just get used to it.
It's not hacker culture where I come from, and it continues only if people enjoy it with all the consequences. There's a difference between a slightly snarky exchange at the office and a forum where people come to talk about ideas. An "eat shit and die" culture might be entertaining for a short while, but ultimately it becomes self-destructive when nobody cares to post or show anything new and everything old gets worshipped by consensus.
Yes, I have no problem telling someone on ShowHN where I see the issues with their project. But that's different from a blanket "come back when you're a Rails-powered millionaire, and by the way if you're not one already you'll never amount to anything" attitude as expressed above.
There is no question that a community like that is possible, you'd just have to wait for all the "losers" to clear out. So if that's really what HN is about to you, ramp it up! But lazy malevolence is still not the same as hacker culture, if such a thing even exists as a singular concept.
I disagree with your argument that antagonistic learning becomes self-destructive. For some, it might, but for those who can deal with it, the lesson that researching a topic before asking about that topic is a valuable one.
Also, no one ever said, "come back when you're a Rails-powered millionaire, and by the way if you're not one already you'll never amount to anything". That's not what's happening above, at all. I agree, if that were the case, that's boring and unhelpful, but that's not at all what happened. That's too specific. The above took place because of the obvious and unnecessary trickery in the submission - people don't like to be taken as fools.
I actually love (and share) your opinion(s) on startup culture.
However, as someone who really does commit to projects (as in, will work on them 6 months after the checks stop rolling in) this list is pretty great. Free traffic from early adopters is a good way to test a new product.
I do think there's a time and a place for this though. Know your market. Free traffic/press is nice, but only if you want a bunch of tech nerds using your stuff.
The right attitude is to not throw shit to the wall and see if it sticks, but to think of an idea and commit to it. With commitment comes the responsibility of doing right by your users, finishing your idea out and not giving up two weeks later. If you aren't prepared for it, if you aren't committed, if you are already nearly burned out from the work you've already put in and have no traction to speak of, well then maybe just leave it alone.
I noticed the general rate at which shit is thrown at walls to check for stickiness seems to have gone up exponentially ever since the lean startup movement became popular.
Well, you know Y-combinator, 500startups, etc. are part of that movement.
It s funny too, because people complain about the lack of innovation and/or people not working on hard/meaningful problems, etc. I happen to agree with that complaint, but it boggles my mind that many don't seem to connect it with the lean startup culture. Seems like a pretty natural consequence.
Not sure if I agree with the second paragraph of this. But the original comment has a point.
CrunchBase and AngelList are meant to be directories of companies. While side projects often turn into companies, there is a difference at least initially. Uploading a weekend side project to these sites is creating noise rather than signal.
It's the job of CrunchBase and AngelList to separate the wheat from the chaff.
There's nothing wrong with hoping a side project becomes a bigger thing, and using available tools to try to make that a reality. Some side projects do go on to be very successful. Like AngelList.
I think your best bet (based on advice from this site and my own experience) is to find the community most relevant to your product and make sure everyone in that community knows you're launching.
Reddit is a great site to hang out on, but most of the people on there - at least from the comments - are college kids with no world or business experience.
Grain of salt? There isn't enough Sodium on this planet I can read Reddit with.
Comments are garbage most of the time unless you find some super niche undeveloped subreddit unplagued by the masses, only retaining passionate users.
What happens is a community starts with people passionate about the topic of the community, and then the focus shifts from content to community preservation once the masses leak in and it devolves from there.
Because it's unmoderated for the most part (subreddit moderators don't count, most are bad at what they do, source: most subreddit content is bad), communities quickly devolve into the lowest common denominator of discussion, memes, bad unfunny overused jokes, and puns (which I really don't mind actually).
Sorry, I have a severe distaste for Reddit once I realized how "dumb" it actually is. I realized this when I saw articles posted to Reddit from HN that hit r/all and how different the comments were. Reddit for the most part seems fueled by hormones, HN is level headed.
I find that leveraging the most popular which are Social Media and social bookmarking works best. Linkedin generates lots of traffic as well so be sure to create a company page in linkedin. Professionals thrive in Linkedin and it's a good platform for you to get introduced to your target market.
We are currently developing a Digital Collaboration Platform that incorporates both file sharing, data capture and social (www.phoenary.com) and we'll be using those sites for the soft launch next month including the sites you've listed.
Actually I have my startup featured on crunchbase and a ton of people contact me monthly fro there for all kinds of services to startups. I guess it's both a good and a bad thing.
For side projects you should checkout http://www.thinkero.us, they love seeing new ideas or hearing about issues you see around you that you wish could be fixed. It's more of a community for open innovation and collaboration with less of the pressures than some of the more financially incentivized sites listed above.
Indeed. I wonder how many people actually read these websites where lots of people spam a link to their new "startup" and where the content is nothing else than just a collection of links. I think the answer is: no one.
Please don't hesitate to post links to your own work. You're putting serious effort into providing value to the community. How else will we know about it?
I believe "Show HN" is for showing something you've made that other people can try out. In other words, it's for when the thing is ready, not when it's being funded. (Or, pet peeve, for collecting email addresses with a landing page that looks deceptively like a product).
It's funny with ShowHN - I know it can be quite useful, but I'm so paranoid to do it. It's a one time shot (I don't want to spam it over again), and if you don't get any feedback, your shot is lost.
HN recognizes if a link has been posted before so if you submit your homepage once that's it.
I've run two Show HN posts for my new project (https://wecombinate.com) and had zero replies or even visits from both. It seems you need to have a group of people upvote early on otherwise you'll disappear very quickly.
While these sources are great, this is not a good approach to getting traction. The type of attention you'll capture won't be of high quality, unless of course these outlets cater to your target market.
Like others have said, you're better off focusing your time and energy finding out where your prospects go for their information and entertainment. TC and the like will give you a big surge in traffic initially, but it won't be the traffic you want, and it'll die off quickly.
Now, a truly great resource for those launching side projects would be a list of sites/magazines broken down my major target market -- eg. pregnant mothers, hackers, foodies, athletes, etc.
Be warned, we still think press plays a major role as a distribution channel, compared to these sites that will only bring you beta users, in the hundreds. :)
Will definitely post more after launch, including this press list. We should be covered by a big player tomorrow. :-)
I'd say you need to hit the road really hard, and try to approach entities to which your product would provide real value.
For example we also found partnerships to be a great distribution channel. We approach them by showing how much value our product can bring to their service (e.g. http://andreipotorac.roon.io/from-blogvio-with-love - this is the real deal). So far it worked great with the ones we approached! This means thousands of potential users so far!
On the other hand, we help them with user acquisition since we're a platform that integrates well with publishing tools.
So:
1. Partnerships
2. Press
3. Sites above
This is the order you should use when building you distribution strategy.
19$ to pitch the idea or launch to a crowd of entrepreneurs -- you get stats, feedback, and emails -- and it's rumored that promo codes for free or super cheap submissions are as simple as emailing info@launchsky.com :)
Full disclosure: I'm on of the guys behind LaunchSky, but we've seen a few startups use LaunchSky.com to launch their project and iterate on it, not just get feedback on an idea that doesn't exist yet.
Pardon my ignorance but I see most of the suggested links from tech news/blog sites. But unless your customers are entrepreneurs and tech readers, shouldn't you launch where your customers are ? (which could be any aggregation website from farming, medicine or any other subject matter)
http://betali.st - quite well known, moderated, gets a decent amount of traffic if you get featured, not too many form fields to fill out.
http://www.kickoffboost.com - moderated, and relatively new, easy submission
http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject - moderated, easy submission
https://www.sideprojectors.com - relatively new, easy submission
http://thestartuppitch.com - moderated, has quite a few more form fields to fill out than others
http://www.erlibird.com/startups - paid $149, last time checked out
http://forrst.com - Easy submission, used to be a great community for feedback - not sure now
http://www.bootstrappist.com - a mailing list of bootstrapped projects - has quite a few subscribers I think.
http://angel.co - Angelist, of course - new startups gets tweeted via various accounts
http://crunchbase.com - Crunchbase - similar to Angelist