The anxiety of product launch day is unmatched. You’re refreshing analytics every few minutes and constantly checking notifications, wondering whether it’s going to be a hit or a miss.

It starts well. Then the excitement fades. The engagement slows, the traffic settles, and by day three, it’s almost deserted.

So what’s the cheat code other founders have cracked that’s still paying off six months after launch? Is it because their product is exceptionally better? Not always. Are they strategic? BIG yes!

The founders who keep getting discovered aren’t relying on just a homepage or one viral tweet. Instead, they’re consistently building backlinks, directory listings, niche communities, AI tools directories, review sites, and anywhere else people actually discover software.

That’s the space Nick Launches is trying to occupy, not as another Product Hunt clone, but as a launch platform built around long-term discoverability rather than one afternoon of internet attention.

What Is Nick Launches?

Nick Launches is a startup launch platform that serves indie founders and developers building SaaS products and AI tools. Its homepage leaves no crumbs: Launch your Product. Don’t just build. Get discovered.

The setup makes sense pretty quickly once you poke around. Every week gets its own leaderboard, where products compete for the top spots. The top three walk away with medal positions. 

Each listing gets a logo, a tagline, and up to three category tags. If you want to peek at a full product page or submit your own, all you need to do is sign in.

What surprised me was the size of the directory. I went in assuming a scrappy board with a few dozen listings and a lot of empty space. Instead, there are 36 categories, and the biggest one isn’t even close to a fair fight. AI sits at 461 listings, Productivity trails at 404, and then there’s a real cliff down to Developer Tools at 190 and Marketing at 180. If you’re launching an AI product, you’re not tiptoeing into an empty room. You’re elbowing your way into one that’s already pretty full.

There’s more to the platform than the directory. A blog covering launches, AI, SEO, and product building, some resource pages, a badge program, and a small but growing shelf of launch tools round things out. It’s run by a former startup CTO who, according to his About page, traded corporate life for building full-time and has a couple of his own products out in the wild, Prompt Builder and InstaPosts among them, alongside a steady habit of writing about SEO and AI.

Where It Actually Fits

Product Hunt still owns launch day. Period. Nothing in the smaller-directory world touches the visibility of a good showing there, and I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon. But Product Hunt was built for one day of attention, and most founders who’ve been through it will tell you how the silence afterwards haunts them.

The whole conversation around launching in 2026 has shifted from how do I win launch day to how do I not disappear the week after. Product Hunt gives you the spike. Directories, Nick Launches included, give you the slow, boring, compounding kind of visibility that’s still showing up in search six months later. Communities like Indie Hackers, Hacker News, or the right subreddit give you something Product Hunt mostly doesn’t: people willing to tell you your onboarding is confusing instead of just tapping upvote and moving on. And once you’re actually selling to businesses, review sites like G2 or Capterra start pulling their weight too.

So if you asked me, point blank, where should I launch my startup, I wouldn’t hand you one answer. I’d hand you a sequence:

  • Product Hunt for the big day.
  • Nick Launches for the long tail.
  • BetaList, Uneed, Fazier, Startup Fame, StartupBase, Launching Next, and Peerlist for the weeks after that.
  • Hacker News or Indie Hackers whenever you’re ready to hear the truth about your product instead of another round of polite applause.

It’s a less thrilling answer than “just launch here and you’re set.” It also happens to be the one that’s actually true.

The Directory Submission Service

Instead of only letting you submit to its own board, Nick Launches also sells a completely separate manual directory-submission service, one that’ll get your product listed across a curated batch of other directories on your behalf, whether or not you’ve ever touched Nick Launches itself. It’s sold on its own, no launch required.

There are three pricing tiers:

  • Starter List, $99 (down from $149): 30+ directories, mostly the medium-DR, free-to-list kind, plus a report showing what happened. Estimated time saved: around 20 hours, which tracks, because filling out the same five form fields sixty different times is exactly the kind of task that has the potential to eat your entire weekend.
  • Pro List, $149 (down from $199): 60+ directories, some of them higher-DR and paid, with a beefier report. Estimated time saved: around 40 hours.
  • Premium List, $199 (down from $249), their bestseller apparently: 100+ directories, the same reporting style, and roughly 70+ hours claimed back.

What stands out isn’t the directory count, though. It’s that Nick Launches is openly needling the entire category of automated submission tools, the ones running $19 to $79 that promise you’ll be listed on two hundred sites by lunchtime. The catch with those, as anyone who’s tried one will tell you, is that quality goes out the window. You end up on directories nobody visits, collecting no-follow links that do nothing for you, sometimes listed somewhere that has nothing to do with what you actually built.

Nick Launches is betting the opposite works better. An actual human doing the submitting, picking directories by Domain Rating and relevance to your niche, and handing you a report with receipts for every single one. They also claim everything’s do-follow only, and that they’ve done this for 300-plus founders so far.

The “DR 5 to 20-plus” number they advertise, and the glowing testimonials sitting under it, are the company grading its own homework. Which is completely normal, but I’d still look at them as a benchmark rather than a promise. Your results will depend on your product, your niche, and where you’re submitting.

Manual vs. Automated: My Actual Take

So, worth paying for or not?

Automated wins on speed. You’ll pay less, get listed faster, and have zero say in whether any of it actually matters. Manual costs more and takes longer, but at least a person looked at each directory and decided it was worth your time before submitting you to it.

Starter’s the right call if you’re pre-traction and just want the basics covered. Once you’ve got some real traction and want broader reach, Pro or Premium start to make more sense. It won’t replace a real content strategy, real backlinks from people who’ve genuinely used what you built, or the bump from a strong Product Hunt showing. No directory listing fixes a product nobody wants, and this one doesn’t pretend to.

I’d go Starter myself. Not for the sake of proven SEO numbers, but because I know exactly how many of those 30 directories I’d actually get around to submitting by hand: zero. That’s what you’re really buying, not backlinks, someone else doing the tedious part so it actually gets done instead of rotting on your to-do list. If the product’s already fine and the only problem is nobody’s found it yet, $99 to make the boring stuff happen isn’t a bad trade.

There’s no cheat code. Just people willing to do the unglamorous work of getting found, directory by directory, long after everyone else has stopped checking their launch-day analytics.