How to Get Backlinks for Your SaaS: What Bootstrapped Founders Actually Do

Backlink tactics compared: cost, effort and link quality

A backlink is a link from another site to yours. Google uses links to discover pages and as one signal of which pages deserve to rank, and AI assistants lean on the same well-linked, often-cited pages. For a new SaaS, the goal isn’t thousands of links. It’s a few dozen relevant sites vouching for you, growing every month.

Here is every tactic in this guide, ranked by how bootstrapped founders typically sequence them:

What makes a backlink worth having

• Relevance. A link from a site your customers read beats a high-authority link from an unrelated one. It also sends visitors who might buy.
• Dofollow vs nofollow. Sites can mark links nofollow, sponsored or ugc; Google treats these as hints rather than votes. (source: developers.google.com) Most social profiles, forums, GitHub and Product Hunt are nofollow. They still bring traffic and get your brand mentioned, so they’re not worthless.
• Referring domains, not link count. Fifty links from one site count far less than one link each from fifty sites.
• Placement. A link in the body of a relevant article beats a footer or sidebar link repeated on every page.

What to avoid

Google’s spam policies name buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, large-scale link exchanges, automated link-building programs, and keyword-stuffed links in widgets distributed across sites. (source: developers.google.com) Skip “1,000 backlinks for $20” offers, private blog networks and reciprocal link rings. The cheapest backlinks are often the most expensive mistake.

Directory submissions: the fastest free backlinks

Startup, SaaS and AI directories are where most founders get their first links. Each listing is a page about your product with a link back, plus a little referral traffic and a better chance of being picked up by AI answers that read those directories.

Our data: we track 80 launch platforms and directories on our launch page (24 directories, 17 launchpads, plus communities, marketplaces and newsletters). 71 of them are free or have a free tier. We’ve confirmed 10 give dofollow links, 17 use nofollow, and for the other 53 we haven’t confirmed either way. Many directories change their link policy or make dofollow a paid upgrade, so check the link on your live listing (right-click, Inspect, look for rel).

How to do it well

1. Prepare a submission kit once: name, one-line tagline, 50-, 150- and 300-word descriptions, logo, 3–5 screenshots, pricing, categories, founder name and social links. Vary the descriptions a little so listings aren’t duplicate text.
2. Start with the relevant ones: category directories for your niche (AI, dev tools, no-code, marketing), review sites your buyers use (G2, Capterra, SaaSHub, AlternativeTo) and the indie launch boards in the next section.
3. Track it in a spreadsheet: URL, date submitted, status, live listing URL, dofollow or not. Many listings take days or weeks to be approved.
4. Don’t blast hundreds of junk directories. Low-quality, auto-generated directories add little and some are spam. Fifty relevant listings beat five hundred random ones.

Full walkthrough: our directory submission guide.

Indie makers who turned directory submission into a business

Submitting is tedious enough that several makers in our directory sell it as a service or a list: Sergiu Chiriac runs AI Directories, a done-for-you service for 100+ directories that made about $7.2K in 30 days on its verified dashboard (source: trustmrr.com); Danny Takacs started Quicklisting as automated submission to 150+ directories (source: indiehackers.com); Karan Arora and Shivam run Boringlaunch (source: boringlaunch.com). If you’d rather do it yourself, Philipp Keller sells a prioritized list of 60+ directories above DR 20 (source: backl.io), Raf Vantongerloo’s Linkto is a free database of 800+ directories (source: lin-k.to), and Roudy’s RankDirs compares directories by Domain Rating (source: rankdirs.com).

Launch platforms: links, traffic and copycat listings

A launch earns links three ways: the launch page itself, write-ups and newsletters that cover the day’s best launches, and scraper directories that copy launch lists. Product Hunt is the biggest, but its product links are nofollow on our checks; the value is the audience and everything that follows from it.

Pieter Levels is the classic example: Nomad List hit #1 on both Hacker News and Product Hunt, bringing roughly 62,000 visitors in total. (source: levels.io) Marko Saric and Uku Täht got Plausible’s turning point from a single opinionated post on Hacker News: more than 50,000 readers in a few days and 166 new trials in the first week, more than the previous four months combined. (source: plausible.io)

Launch boards with confirmed dofollow links

From our data, these 10 give dofollow links (sometimes only after a vote threshold or on a paid tier):

• Uneed (freemium) — Indie product launches with an SEO backlink
• Microlaunch (freemium) — Month-long visibility and maker feedback
• TinyLaunch (freemium) — Badge-for-backlink launches
• Startup Fame (freemium) — Permanent listing with a do-follow link
• Twelve Tools (freemium) — Getting a tool in front of daily browsers
• OpenHunts (freemium) — Weekly launches for tiny startups
• LaunchIgniter (freemium) — Quick cross-posting of an existing launch
• IndieHunt (freemium) — AI and indie SaaS launches
• Startup Spotlight (paid) — Paid permanent backlink for micro-SaaS
• Findly.tools (freemium) — Tools for developers and creators

Several are run by indie makers in our directory: Jaisal Rathee’s Tiny Startups (about $180K lifetime revenue on TrustMRR) (source: trustmrr.com), Praneet Brar’s Aura++, EarlyHunt and IndieHunt (source: trustmrr.com), Tom Otto’s Launch Llama (source: trustmrr.com), Sofia’s UppLaunch, Avinash Vagh’s NoonLaunch, vmk’s ShowBuild and Daniel Smidstrup’s DanielLaunches. Small boards like these are easy to get on; the trade-off is less traffic.

Tip: relaunch. Every major feature is a new reason to post on launch boards, Show HN and your niche communities. See how to launch your product for the launch-day playbook.

Free tools and data reports: links you don’t have to ask for

The best backlinks come from writers who link to you because your page is the most useful thing to cite. Two kinds of page earn those links again and again: free tools and original data.

Free tools

A calculator, checker, generator or template that solves one small problem your customers have. People bookmark it, share it in communities and list it in “best free tools” articles.

• Thibault Louis-Lucas (Tibo) (Tweet Hunter): the team made free side products and resources and launched them on Product Hunt; his co-founder says this helped them reach $5K MRR within three months. (source: failory.com)
• Ruben Gamez (Bidsketch): before writing product code he published keyword-targeted posts and free proposal templates for people searching for them, collecting emails in exchange. (source: saasclub.io)
• Samuel Pigny (FrogDR): a free Domain Rating tracker with a $5 upgrade; free utilities like this get listed on tool directories and roundups that link back. (source: frogdr.com) Lars’s domainrating.lol (free listings ranked by DR) works the same way. (source: domainrating.lol)

How to pick one: look for a search with clear intent near your product (“invoice template”, “cron expression generator”, “MRR calculator”), build the simplest useful version on your own domain, and link from it to the paid product where it naturally helps.

Data reports and opinionated research

Writers need numbers to cite. If you have data nobody else has (anonymised product usage, a survey of your users, prices you track, a public dataset you cleaned up), publish it with a clear headline finding and a chart people can embed.

• Josh Pigford (Baremetrics): launched Open Startups in 2015, public live revenue dashboards for Baremetrics, Buffer, ConvertKit, Ghost and others, so anyone could follow their real numbers. The announcement said over 125,000 entrepreneurs were following along. (source: baremetrics.com)
• Marko Saric (Plausible): opinionated, well-researched posts about Google Analytics and privacy reached Hacker News again and again; four or five went viral in the first six months. (sources: opensource.com, plausible.io)

Once it’s live, email the writers who covered the topic recently and tell them what’s new in your data. Don’t ask for a link; give them a reason to cite you.

Guest posts, podcasts and HARO-style sourcing

Guest posts and podcasts

Writing for a site your customers read earns an author-bio or in-context link and puts you in front of its audience. Podcasts work the same way: almost every episode page links to the guest’s site.

• Ryan Robinson calls guest blogging the best repeatable strategy he’s used: he wrote for Buffer and had contributor columns at Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider and Fast Company, and credits it with quality backlinks, traffic and partnerships. His blog grew to around 500,000 monthly readers. (source: starterstory.com)
• Ruben Gamez emailed 30-odd bloggers asking them to review Bidsketch. Hardly anyone replied, but the few reviews that came out made a real difference early on. (source: saasclub.io)

How to pitch: read three recent posts, pitch two or three specific titles they haven’t covered that only you can write (your data, your mistakes, your teardown), and offer a full draft. Skip sites with a “write for us” page full of casino and crypto posts; Google treats large-scale guest posting for links as link spam.

HARO-style journalist requests

Journalists and bloggers post requests for expert quotes; you answer, and if they use your answer they usually credit you with a link. The original HARO was rebranded Connectively, shut down in December 2024, and the HARO name was relaunched by Featured.com in 2025. Options in 2026:

• Featured (owns the HARO brand now) and Qwoted, both with free tiers and paid plans.
• Source of Sources, a free email list started by HARO’s original founder Peter Shankman.
• Help a B2B Writer for B2B and SaaS topics.
• The #journorequest hashtag on X, free.

Hit rates are low (expect one placement from every 10–20 good answers), so answer only where you have real expertise, reply within hours, and lead with a quotable two-sentence answer.

Open-source READMEs and “powered by” badges

Open source and GitHub

Links on GitHub itself are nofollow, but a useful repository gets linked from blog posts, tutorials, “awesome” lists, docs and Hacker News threads. Put your site link at the top of the README, in the repo’s website field and in your docs.

• Uku Täht and Marko Saric (Plausible): after open-sourcing, coverage on Hacker News and Lobsters took the repo from about 500 to 4,300 stars and onto GitHub’s trending list, which snowballed further. (source: opensource.com)
• Marcel Cruz (Public APIs): keeps a crowdsourced list of free APIs on GitHub with roughly 9,000 stars, which feeds the publicapis.dev directory site. (source: star-history.com)
• Baptiste Arnaud (Typebot): keeps the chatbot builder open and self-hostable alongside the paid cloud version. (source: github.com)

You don’t need to open-source your whole product. A small library, CLI, template or SDK related to what you sell can do the job, and submitting it to the relevant awesome-lists earns links from repos that developers read.

“Powered by” and “made by” badges

If your product shows up on other people’s sites (forms, widgets, status pages, store locators, embeds), a small badge linking back turns every customer into a referral source.

• Tyler Tringas (Storemapper): never ran paid ads in five years; alongside the Shopify App Store and Google rankings, a “Powered by” link on customers’ store locators was one of his channels. (source: saasclub.io)
• Marie Martens and Filip Minev (Tally): the team describes a generous free plan plus the “Made with Tally” badge on free forms as their main word-of-mouth loop. (source: indiehackers.com)
• Jakob Greenfeld: a small “made by” badge on Gum Spy led Shaan Puri to find him and mention the product on the My First Million podcast, which brought dozens of sales. (source: jakobgreenfeld.com)

Keep it clean: use your brand name as the anchor text, never keywords, and let customers remove it on paid plans. Google’s spam policy specifically calls out keyword-rich links in widgets spread across many sites, so treat badges as a referral and brand channel, and consider rel="nofollow" on them.

Integrations, marketplaces and partner pages

Every integration you build is a chance at a listing on a strong, relevant domain: the partner’s app directory, its marketplace and often a co-written tutorial. These links are permanent and send buyers who already use a tool next to yours.

• Tyler Tringas: Storemapper grew mainly through the Shopify ecosystem. It was the only store locator in the App Store, so merchants searching there found it, and he answered store-locator questions in the Shopify forums with a signature pointing to the app. (source: saasclub.io)

1. List every integration publicly. Zapier, Make, Slack, Notion, Shopify, WordPress, Webflow and Chrome all have app directories with a listing page per app.
2. Ask partners for a page. Many SaaS companies keep an integrations or partners page and are happy to add you once the integration works.
3. Co-market. Write the “how to connect X to Y” tutorial and offer it to the partner’s blog or docs.
4. List your tech stack. Tools you use often feature customers on showcase pages (“built with”, customer stories). Tell them you’re a happy customer. Makers in our directory list their stacks on our stack pages, which shows which vendors to approach.

Make sure your backlinks get indexed

A link only counts once Google has crawled and indexed the page it sits on. Directory listings and launch pages on small sites often sit unindexed for weeks, or forever.

1. Check: search site: plus the listing URL, or use the URL Inspection tool if you control the site.
2. Help discovery: link to your best listings from your own press or “as featured on” page, and share them on social profiles that get crawled often.
3. Your own pages: submit a sitemap and request indexing in Google Search Console; use IndexNow for Bing and other engines that support it.
4. Indexing tools: several indie makers build tools for this. Jacky Chou’s IndexChex checks and speeds up indexing of pages and backlinks (source: indexchex.com); Ian Nuttall built URL Monitor, which reached about $8K MRR before he sold it, and now offers index monitoring in his Search Console toolkit (sources: ian.is, cromojo.featurebase.app). IndexRusher, built by IndieMakerList’s curator, does the same job of getting new pages and backlinks crawled faster.

No tool can make Google keep a page it considers low quality, so indexing tools help most with good pages that are simply slow to be discovered.

A 90-day backlink plan for a new SaaS

Measure referring domains monthly with Search Console’s Links report (free) or a backlink checker. Many makers in our directory build these: Pete’s CrawlGraph (source: crawlgraph.com), Samuel Pigny’s FrogDR for Domain Rating, and outreach tools such as Ilias Ism’s LinkDR (source: linkdr.com) and Frey Chu’s HeyLinks, which finds sites linking to your competitors (source: heylinks.ai).

Links get pages ranked, but pages still need to exist. If you’re not publishing, see our comparison of AI SEO tools, and browse makers who grew through search on the revenue pages.