My 3-Month Startup Directory Submission Journey —...

Over the last few months I submitted five websites to every free startup directory I could find. Not as a theoretical exercise — I needed backlinks. My domain rating was stuck at 20 and organic traffic was flat. Here is what actually happened. Month 1: The Naive Phase I found a few GitHub repos listing 300+ directories and started submitting to everything. No filtering, no strategy. Just fill form, click submit, next. Success rate: roughly 40%. The other 60% was a mix of dead sites (404, parked