Startup directories that actually gave us a dofollow link

Every "best startup directories" list has 80 entries and no data. Nobody tells you which ones link to you with a real, dofollow link, and which ones tag it nofollow or wrap it in a redirect so it passes nothing.

We launched MeltsWell in August 2026 on a domain with zero backlinks, submitted it to the directories below, and pulled the Ahrefs backlink report five weeks later. This is what came back.

Short version: eight directories gave dofollow links. One of them did more than the other seven combined. Product Hunt gave nofollow, like it always does. The rest of our 400 "referring domains" are spam.

What "counts" means

A link helps your Domain Rating when three things are true:

1. It's dofollow. No rel="nofollow", no rel="ugc", no rel="sponsored".
2. It's a direct link to your domain, not a redirect through /out/ or /go/.
3. The page linking to you doesn't link to thousands of others. A DR 75 page with 20 outbound links passes a lot. A DR 50 page with 3,000 passes nothing.

Ahrefs shows all three in the backlink report. I sorted by dofollow and read the "linked domains" column.

Dofollow, worth it

Directory	DR	Outbound links on the page	Notes
uneed.best	75	13 to 23	Free submission. Two pages linked to us: the tool listing and a curated "best products" list. Did most of our DR by itself.
askmatchbox.com	51	3	We didn't submit. They picked the launch up and listed it.
newname.ai	29	4	Scraped our launch. Has a "claim this" button.
launches.uicomet.com	15	5 to 7	Free. Dofollow with a ?ref= parameter, which still counts.
thejoai.com	10	3	AI tools directory. Took a non-AI product anyway.
marketgenius.ai	3	2	Small. Dofollow.
startup-list.org	3	3	Small. Dofollow. Shows author name.
finderlaunch.com	3	4	Small. Dofollow with ?ref=.

If you only do one: uneed. Free, DR 75, dofollow, and their editors build "best of" lists that link out again.

The three DR 3 sites look like nothing. They're not nothing. Each one is a real domain linking to you with few other outbound links, and ten of those is a floor that keeps you off zero.

Nofollow, still worth it for other reasons

Product Hunt. Nofollow, as always. Launch there for people, not for links. A side effect: sites like crunch.id (DR 54) publish daily lists of domains that launched on Product Hunt. Ours got a nofollow mention there too. No DR, but a real page mentioning your name.

What didn't show up

Some directories I submitted to never appeared in Ahrefs at all. Either they never published the listing, they render the link with JavaScript in a way Ahrefs doesn't index, or the page isn't crawled. Either way, from a links point of view, they don't exist. I'm not naming them because "not crawled yet" and "never published" look identical from outside, and it's not fair to call a site useless when the truth might be that Ahrefs hasn't been there.

The spam that comes with a new domain

Within two weeks of launch, about 30 domains linked to us with the anchor text "High Quality Dofollow Backlinks DA 50 PA 40 Premium PBN Network Service meltswell.com Buy Backlinks Online Cheap." Same page template on every domain. Each page links to 3,000 other sites.

Nobody bought this. It's scraper networks that grab new domains from launch sites and link to them in bulk to make their own pages look like hubs. Some of these domains show DR 30 to 50 in Ahrefs. They pass nothing, because the equity is split 3,000 ways.

Google ignores it. I'm leaving it alone. If you want the pattern for a disavow file, the URLs look like /all/1888/20.html on random domains, and .shop domains with 40-word slugs about link building.

What I'd do for the next launch

1. uneed.best the day you launch. Before Product Hunt.
2. launches.uicomet.com, startup-list.org, finderlaunch.com, thejoai.com. Ten minutes total.
3. Product Hunt on a Tuesday, for the people, not the link.
4. Wait two weeks, then pull the free Ahrefs backlink checker. Sort by dofollow. Read the linked-domains column. Ignore everything over a few hundred.
5. Write down which ones showed up. Next launch, skip the ones that didn't.

We track our own DR from 0.4 to 18 in a separate post, with the same data.