How to Submit Your SaaS to SideProjects (2026 Guide)

SideProjects is a showcase for projects built outside work: honest feedback, small audience, and occasionally the first real users.

The short answer

The submission is the easy part. What decides whether SideProjects was worth the ten minutes is whether the listing gets published, whether the outbound link is followed, and whether the page is indexed six weeks later.

What SideProjects is

A community showcase for side projects, where makers post what they built and others browse and comment. Start from sideprojects.io, where the submission form lives.

What it is good for

Community audiences are small, opinionated and technical. They will tell you what is wrong with the product, which is worth more than a citation.

Before you touch the form

Write the origin story and the lesson before the pitch. Side-project showcases are read as stories with a link attached, and a straight product description earns honest feedback of the wrong kind.

Submitting, in order

Write the origin problem first
Add what you learned building it
Choose the closest category
Post with a live link
Reply to every comment

One thing that catches people out

Post the problem before the product. Side-project audiences respond to 'I built this because X annoyed me' far more than to a feature list.

Checking what you actually got

Search the exact listing title in Google — absent means not indexed
Count how many outbound links sit beside yours on the page
Inspect the rel attribute on the link to your domain
Follow the link and confirm it lands on the page you submitted
Write the outcome in the sheet the same day

Where it fits in a launch plan

Place it after the three directories that matter most in your category and before the long tail. The first three teach you what forms check; the long tail is the same form twenty more times.

Story before pitch

A side-project showcase is read as a narrative with a link at the end. Starting with the product reverses the format the audience came for.

Open with the annoyance that caused the build. That is the sentence people reply to.

The lesson is the content

Every project has one: what you would do differently, what took longer than expected, what you cut. Those sentences are why the audience is there.

A post without a lesson is an advertisement with extra steps.

What this audience gives back

Honest criticism, occasionally a first user, sometimes a collaborator. The criticism is the part that has value beyond the week.

Founders who defend instead of listening get one round of engagement and none afterwards.

Honest feedback as the return

This is the rare channel where the return on ten minutes can exceed the citation: a specific objection you had not considered.

Budget time to reply, not just to post.

Writing the origin story

Three paragraphs: the problem, what you built, what you learned. Add the link once at the end.

Keep it plain. This audience writes plainly and notices when a post is ghostwritten.

After the comments

Make one change that a commenter suggested and return to the thread to say so. That single follow-up is remembered longer than the original post.

It also converts a stranger into someone who will look at the next thing you build.

The link's value

One referring domain from a community site, usually nofollow, occasionally followed. Traffic is a burst of a few sessions.

The measurable value is feedback and a small citation. Both are real, and neither is authority.

The audience is other builders

Most visitors are makers evaluating what someone else shipped, not buyers evaluating a vendor. They respond to the build, the constraint and the honest limitation.

A listing written for customers reads as an advertisement in a room full of people who have shipped something themselves.

FAQ

Is feedback usually useful?

Often brutal and often right. Both are valuable.

Is the feedback useful?

Often brutal and often right. Both are worth more than the citation.

Where SaasHunt fits

SaasHunt is the launch half of the same plan: SaaS-specific, publishing at 08:00 UTC, daily and weekly Top 5 with the weekly winners going to the newsletter, and a dofollow link on every approved listing. Free requires the badge and can queue for up to 270 days; Premium at $9.9 skips the queue; Premium Plus at $12.9 adds earliest scheduling and a permanent featured slot; SEO Growth at $49 adds the newsletter and a dedicated review; DR Booster at $50 adds ten permanent dofollow links from DR 30–65 sites.

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