Stay Up

I’ve been building small products for a while, and one thing keeps coming up: building the product is often easier than getting anyone to discover it.

SEO is part of that problem.

There are hundreds of directories, launch sites, leaderboards, and “submit your startup” pages. Some are useful. Some hide links behind redirects. Some use nofollow. Some ask you to add their badge first. Some accept your project and then apparently send it into another dimension.

So I built Stay Up: https://stayup.lol

The idea is pretty simple.

You can submit your project and get a direct, crawlable link to it. Projects are ranked on a public leaderboard, and Stay Up also tracks their Domain Rating so you can see how they grow over time.

I wanted it to be useful for two groups:

• builders looking for another legitimate backlink and a bit of exposure

• people like me who keep checking whether all this backlink work is actually moving their DR

I’m also experimenting with tools around this. For example, I want Stay Up to analyze other directories and tell you whether their backlinks are actually worth getting: is the listing crawlable, is the outbound link direct, is it dofollow, can Google actually reach it, etc.

Right now Stay Up itself is still small and evolving. I’m deliberately keeping submissions cheap while the site grows rather than pretending a brand-new directory is worth $50 per listing.

The current submission price starts at $1.

I’m mainly interested in making this genuinely useful rather than turning it into yet another giant startup directory full of abandoned projects.

Would be interested to hear from other indie hackers:

What would make a directory/backlink site actually useful enough for you to keep coming back to it after submitting your project once?