Why Your Startup's Domain Rating Matters, and How to Grow It

Most builders go through the same thing. A good idea, weeks of work, a thing that finally runs, and then the slow realisation that nobody is using it. Sometimes that is because the tool is not good enough. Far more often it is because nobody knows it exists.

Distribution is the hard part now, and AI has made it harder. When building was expensive, shipping something that worked was itself a filter. It is not any more, so the pile you are standing in is much bigger and most of it is noise. The good news is that distribution is a solvable problem, and one of the best places to start is the least glamorous: your Domain Rating. It compounds, and it makes everything you do afterwards work better.

Domain Rating is a score from 0 to 100, created by Ahrefs, that measures how strong your backlink profile is. A brand new domain starts at 0. Product Hunt sits at 91.

You raise it by getting other sites to link to you. The links work like votes: another site vouching, in public, that there is something at your URL worth pointing at. And the votes are not equal. One link from a strong, established domain is worth more than a pile of links from weak ones, which is why buying a thousand links from nowhere moves nothing.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about DR, because it changes what counts as good news. Getting from 0 to 20 is very doable in a few weeks. Getting from 40 to 60 is months of consistent work. The same twenty points cost wildly different amounts depending on where you are standing.

The practical consequence: do the easy part early. The links that take a new domain from 5 to 15 are available to anyone willing to spend a couple of afternoons, and they are never that cheap again.

The third one is the argument. Almost everything else in early marketing is rented: ads stop the day you stop paying, a post is dead in 48 hours. Links are the rare thing that keeps paying, and each one makes the next piece of content you publish slightly more likely to be found. That is why it is worth doing before you feel ready, rather than after.

For a founder with no audience and no budget, the best first move is launching on startup directories. The well-known ones are Product Hunt and Peerlist, but there are hundreds, and they are good for different reasons.

They work for two separate reasons, and it is worth keeping them apart:

You do not need to hit hundreds. Knowing which ones are worth the afternoon is most of the skill, and the honest shortcut is to sort by the DR of the directory itself and start at the top. A handful of strong listings will move a new domain from roughly 5 to 10 within days, because the base is so small that anything registers. Past that, it is a matter of working down the list.

The list above is LaunchPanda, which ranks 267 or so directories by the traffic and backlinks they actually deliver and then fills in the submission forms for you. It is what we used, and it is where both screenshots in this post come from. The work underneath is the same either way; the ranking is the part worth having, because it is the difference between an afternoon spent on Product Hunt and Peerlist and an afternoon spent on directories nobody reads.

We did exactly this for Wysera, so rather than describe it in the abstract, here is the actual line.

Two things in that chart are worth more than the headline number. The first is the shape: it rises fastest at the start and then steps up in jumps rather than climbing smoothly, which is what the logarithmic scale looks like in practice. The second is that we are not the outlier. Five other products on the same chart show the same curve, which is the useful part, because one company's result is an anecdote and six is a pattern.

The obvious shortcut is to buy links, or to blast submissions at every directory that will take them. It does not work, and it is worth being clear why rather than just disapproving. Directories that exist only to sell listings have no audience, so there is no traffic. Google has been discounting that kind of link for well over a decade, so there is little ranking benefit. And a backlink profile made mostly of those links is a pattern that is easy to spot, which is the thing you do not want to be.

The version that works is slower and duller: launch properly on directories that have real users, publish things worth linking to, and let the two compound. There is no trick underneath it.

DR is one lever on the larger problem, which is that being findable is now harder than building. If you want the wider version of that argument, we wrote about the three surfaces distribution actually runs on, and about how AI answers change what being found means.