Where to launch your app
A short decision guide to launch platforms, directories and communities: what each one is actually good for, and what to skip.
There is no single place to launch anymore. There is a landscape: one big launch day site, a handful of communities that punish self-promotion, a long tail of directories, and search. Most makers pick wrong because they only know the first one.
Here is the map, sorted by what you're actually trying to get. Pick the row that matches your goal and ignore the rest.
If you want one big spike
Launch-day platforms — Product Hunt above all — concentrate attention into 24 hours. The spike is real, the traffic is mostly other makers, and it's over the next day. Worth doing once per product, badly worth doing repeatedly.
Twelve alternatives, and what each rewards →
If you want a permanent listing
Directories don't spike. They accumulate. A listing keeps existing after launch week, keeps being crawled, and keeps sending a trickle of people who were looking for something like what you built. This is the boring, compounding half of distribution and most people skip it.
If you want people, not pageviews
Communities — subreddits, Discords, Slack groups, Hacker News — give you the only feedback that matters early: someone using the thing and telling you it's confusing. They also ban drive-by promotion, so you have to actually be there.
If you want it to keep working while you sleep
Search is the only channel that grows without you posting. It is also the slowest. Start it on day one precisely because it takes months.
The short version
Week one
Ship, then get listed everywhere that will have you. Directories first — they're permanent and they take an afternoon.
Week two
One launch-day platform, properly prepared. Assets ready, first comment written, people told in advance.
Ongoing
Be genuinely present in two communities. Write the pages that answer what your users search for.
What to skip
- ◆Anyone selling "submit to 500 directories" — most of those sites have no visitors and exist to sell submissions.
- ◆Paying for a launch-day boost before you've checked that launch-day traffic converts for you at all.
- ◆Buying followers, upvotes or reviews. Platforms detect it and it teaches you nothing.
Where we fit
theappwall.com is the permanent-listing kind. One square per app, $5 once, kept forever, ranked by clicks rather than by who launched loudest today. No subscription and nothing to renew.
Your app isn't on the wall yet.
One square, $5, forever. No subscription, no reviews, no feed to keep feeding.
Add your app — $5