11 Best Places to Promote Your Startup Business (for FREE)

The one thing that a startup should never ignore is the marketing. Marketing acts as a bridge between your customers and your product & services. Marketing is the only way to make your products closer to your audience and at the same time, your audience will be closer to your product.

Quite a few numbers of startups have failed big time because they have failed in creating awareness about their business & proper promotion of their products.

What should be your startup promotion strategy?

Before you start your marketing campaign you must know your target audience.
This is the most significant thing you should take care of when promoting your startup business.
Identify your target audience which can be interested in buying your product or service based on the location, gender, age etc. and then start promoting your product on places where your target audience is mostly found.

Another important thing is competition, you should know who is your competitor and how do you differ from them?
Business owners should know who is snagging business from them and how each competitor differs in their services, quality, customer support, communication and overall marketing strategy.

It’s great to be the best service provider but that is useless if the competitor is getting more buyers.
When you have answers to these questions you can easily start your marketing campaign in the right direction.

Although there are various ways through which you can promote your startup & generate leads for your Startup, today we will be looking into the best places where you can submit your startup & gain more visibility.

Where to promote your Startup Without Spending your Marketing Dollars

If you want to promote your product or Startup you must have a proper marketing plan. A product marketing plan sets the objectives for promotion and describes ways to achieve them. The following list of places where you can submit your startup has been curated after much research that claims to start giving positive results.

1. Hacker News

Hacker News is a social news website that mainly deals in computer science and entrepreneurship.

This platform can be the most suitable one for those who are having a startup serving a technical audience. If you want to target the tech people, then it can be a great place to promote your product or service to a community of entrepreneurs.

The startups can have the best chance to come in the eyes of more than 70,000 visitors in just one day. Imagine how speedily your business can become popular with this community that has more than 150k subscribers.

Read here how you can submit your startup on Hacker News.

2. Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a platform that has more than 90k subscribers.

It allows users to share and discover new products and having a voting system that gives your product a chance to come in the top list depending on the number of votes it gets.

It is the most suitable platform to promote products related to technology.
The best thing about using Product Hunt is that if anything goes viral about your business or product, it can significantly grow your business in the spur of the moments.

With Product Hunt, your product can come closer to those customers who are always in search of new products.

Read here how to promote your startup business, your product & services on Product Hunt.

3. BetaList

BetaList is an online platform that enables users to get an overview of upcoming internet startups and find and get early access to them.

It allows business owners to promote and advertise their startup business launches to an audience of early adopters. BetaList has been around for a few years now.

The option of Promo which is a powerful promotion creation and management application helps to generate new business and motivate customer retention. This is the easiest way to promote a product, service, or event.

It has been the realm to featuring some of the world’s famous startups today as we know them at an early stage usually before they get launched.

Here’s how you can submit your startup to the Beta list.

4. Reddit-Side Projects

Reddit is an American social news platform that includes web content rating, and discussion about the website. Registered members are allowed to submit their content to the website such as links, text posts, and images.

This platform has a voting system that allows other users to vote for the product or service. It proves actually a wonderful place when it comes to getting very quick feedback and let you go for discussions on any topic.

It is one of the best sources for self-promotion of the startup. Being engaged with the Reddit community of 9k subscribers will help you sell your idea more for free.

5. AngelList

AngelList is an online community that connects startups with investors to smooth-running the fundraising process.

Many have raised more than 1 million from AngelList for their startup. What’s exceptional to AngelList is the speed and proficiency with which they can control an all-star network of active investors in front of a qualified stream of startups.

If you need funds to raise funding for the startup, Angellist is the right platform to build a community that will help you get seed-funding. Angellist is one of the best directories for showcasing startups world-wide.

Follow these steps to get listed on AngelList

6. The Startup Pitch

The Startup Pitch is a platform that allows you to publish startup news and help to get attention and coverage for upcoming startups.

The Startup Pitch also enables the startups to answer some questions about their product or service and eventually turn into a pitch.

Here you can get feedback on your pitch from the community of subscribers of 25k who also help to circulate your startup all around the world. It doesn’t cost you anything.

7. Launching Next

Launching next represents the world’s most promising new startups, startup ideas and great business ideas. They exhibit startups to their thousands of readers.

It is similar to BetaList that features the most auspicious startups on a regular basis. It has great guides and content in relation to inaugurating startups to gain early user traction at almost no cost.

Further related to their provided information, they have founders launching their startups, and asking them their experiences of launching startups, and what knowledge and experience they gain.

8. Y Combinator

Y Combinator can help a startup in two ways, the best and the most important thing they do is to work with startups on their business ideas.

Another is they help founders to deal with investors.

They teach founders how to pitch their startups to investors and how to close a deal. Through their startup school, the business owners can participate in the course where they can get access to the founder-advisors who help them by giving feedback on their companies.

Y Combinator’s goal is to get the owners through the first phase where the startup creates something majestic to raise money and then introduce them to the investors and even acquires.

Apply for funding at Y Combinator

9. StartupList

StartupList is a community of early adopters looking to find startups find targeted early adopters. It has the best collections of the best startups in different places which allow the users to follow the startups they are interested in.

10. Tech Crunch

TechCrunch is one of the top business websites that help startup owners to promote their startups all around the world.

Almost more than 6.5 Million US readers come across TechCrunch every month. The readers are mainly from the tech industry that includes business capitalists, startup fans, investors, business decision-makers, entrepreneurs, etc.

So the possibilities are very high for a startup to get noticed by millions in just 30 days.

Here’s how you can get listed on TechCrunch

11. The Startup INC

The Startup INC is one of the fastest-growing startup directories. It helps startups to get listed their startup and attract customers and investors from all over the world to increase their business reach.

The Startup INC discovers connections to industry experts and business partners. Choosing this platform for the promotion of your startup business can bring huge traffic to your website which in return helps in attracting new customers for your startup business.

Click here to submit your startup at The Startup INC.

Your Turn

Being a founder of an early-stage startup you need to be prepared for tons of hard work and commitments.

Besides this, you need to make sure that you explore each platform to list and promote your startup so that you can attract a new audience for your startup.

The provided list of the startup directories is likely to get a good amount of traffic to your new startup as well as help in spreading the word about your new startup.