So, over time, my Obsidian wiki, with Claude Code had more or less enough context on what all I tried.
In May, when I launched a new product called GritGlean, I decided to not spend a penny.
No ad budget, no audience to speak of yet, just a working thing you have built and a stubborn refusal to pay for visibility you haven’t earned?
You’re at the right place.
So I asked Claude to find everything I had tried on.
And, I gave myself a rule.
One free directory or launch site a day, minimum for 28 days straight.
No skipping, no batching three submissions on a Sunday to catch up.
Some days I even tried 3 or 4, but one was a minimum.
Just show up, submit, move on.
Here’s what four weeks of that actually looked like.
The rule I set for myself
Every morning before I touched anything else, I picked the next site off my list and submitted.
Some took two minutes.
Some wanted a logo in a specific aspect ratio, a category tag I had to think about, or an account I had to verify by email first or get their badge on my site.
A few made me wait days, some even months for approval before the listing even went live. That didn’t matter. My goal was to submit.
Finding the free ones was never easy (A lot of free ones now had a 9$ tier)
Submitting was also not the easy part as I thought.
The first week taught me the biggest lesson of the whole month: The submissions where I actually wrote a real one-line description, picked the right category, and showed up to answer comments outperformed the ones I rushed, even on the exact same site.
Once I got past the big names, the list got more specific.
And by the last week I’d hit the sites I’d never even heard of before starting this.
Most of these sent negligible direct traffic.
A few surprised me.
The value here wasn’t really about the traffic though, it was backlinks, and a bit of social proof I could point to later! :)
What actually moved the needle
If I’m honest, most of the 41 did close to nothing measurable on their own.
But a small handful, maybe four or five, accounted for almost all the real traffic and signups from the whole month.
The pattern I noticed: it wasn’t really about the site’s overall size, it was about how well my product matched the audience that specific site actually attracts.
The other real win was compounding, not from any single site, but from doing this every day for a month (It has worked out for me, even on Medium where I have 300 articles)
Each submission is a backlink, a mention, another place your name shows up when someone searches for it later. That adds up in a way that’s hard to see day to day but shows up over weeks.
What I’d do differently
I’d spend more time on the pitch itself before I ever hit submit, since the sites where I rushed the description are the ones I remember doing the worst, regardless of how big the site was.
The list itself
I put together the full checklist I used, best 28 free launch sites, one per day for four weeks, with space to track what you submit and check off as you go.
It’s free to use if you want to run the same experiment:
If you run it yourself, I’d genuinely like to hear which ones worked for you.
My guess is the answer depends more on your product and audience than on any site’s overall reputation, but I’ve only got my own data point to go on so far.
In case we are meeting for the first time, come over here, it’ll be worth the roller coaster of articles that are gonna come up in the next few weeks.