How to Submit to The Startup Inc: A 2026 Walkthrough

The Startup Inc is a startup media and directory property: listings, articles and founder-oriented content. Audience overlap with your buyers is the question to answer first.

The short answer

The only question that matters with The Startup Inc is whether the category page it publishes you into has search visibility of its own. If it does, the listing inherits it; if it does not, you have bought a card.

What The Startup Inc is

A startup publication with directory sections where submitted companies and products are listed alongside editorial coverage. Start from thestartupinc.com, where the submission form lives.

What it is good for

General and niche directories give a young domain a citation that persists for years, which matters when the domain currently has almost none.

Before you touch the form

Write the two-paragraph pitch separately from the listing, and lead it with the fact nobody could guess. Media directories treat listings as housekeeping and stories as content.

Submitting, in order

Submit the listing through the form
Draft a two-paragraph pitch
Lead with the unusual fact
Offer a founder for comment
Follow up once

One thing that catches people out

Pitch the story separately from the listing. The form gets you a page; a specific angle — funding, unusual origin, a contrarian metric — gets you coverage.

Checking what you actually got

Confirm the page is live within a week of submitting
Inspect the anchor: direct link or redirect
Note the referring domain’s DR in the same row
Re-check indexation at one month and again at three
Delete dead listings from the count instead of leaving them in

Where it fits in a launch plan

Sequence matters less here than recording. Whichever order you submit in, the value appears in the audit six weeks later, when you can see which catalogues were worth the time.

Listing and story are two asks

A media property with a directory section has two intake processes and two different reasons to say yes. The listing is housekeeping that anybody can have; the story is content that has to earn its place.

Send both, but send them separately, and never let the listing form carry the pitch. The editor who handles listings is not the editor who commissions coverage.

The angle nobody could guess

A story needs a fact a reader could not infer from the homepage: the unusual origin, the contrarian metric, the customer who uses the product for something unintended, the decision to shrink rather than grow.

If nothing like that exists, there is no story yet. Wait for one rather than pitching a product announcement, which is not news to anyone outside the company.

What editors do with submissions

They triage for fit and novelty in about thirty seconds. A pitch that opens with the company name and a category description fails both tests at once.

Open with the fact. Then one sentence on what the company does, then why now. Three sentences, and the editor knows whether to reply.

Separating the two pitches

Submit the listing with plain, factual copy and no claims about the future. Send the pitch as a short email with the angle in the subject line and the fact in the first sentence.

Mixing them produces a listing that reads like a press release and a pitch that reads like a form. Both underperform.

What coverage requires

Usually an interview, sometimes a customer reference, always a willingness to be edited. Companies that need approval over every sentence rarely get covered twice.

Decide in advance which claims are non-negotiable and let the rest go. Coverage that is slightly wrong beats no coverage, within reason.

If there is no story

Take the listing and skip the pitch. A directory page on a media-adjacent domain is a respectable citation, and pretending a product update is news damages the relationship you would need later.

Nobody remembers the company that did not pitch. Everybody remembers the one that pitched quarterly with nothing to say.

Measuring a media listing

Referral traffic from the directory section is modest and mostly one-off. The measurable returns are the page itself, the occasional branded search it produces, and the credibility of a link from a publication.

Record it as a citation with a media upside, and check the page once a year.

FAQ

Is editorial coverage likely?

Only with a real story. A launch alone rarely qualifies, which is why the pitch and the listing are separate actions.

Where SaasHunt fits

Worth pairing with a platform that publishes on a schedule rather than a queue. SaasHunt launches at 08:00 UTC, ranks daily and weekly, and gives every approved listing a dofollow link; tiers start at $0 and run through $9.9, $12.9, $49 and $50 — the pricing page explains what each adds.

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