[gnicholas]

A couple years ago, I saw a similar submission list for startups. Having recently launched, I took the list very seriously — checking out the sites and ranking them in order of desirability, then submitting to a couple sites each week with language that I had tailored to appeal to each site based on what they covered.

Nothing happened. A month or two later, I decided this was a waste of time. But before closing the remaining browser tabs (which were the ones low on my priority list), I decided to submit a one-sentence description to the remaining sites.

The next morning, I heard back from one of the sites [1], which not only wanted to feature my startup [2] — they also wanted to license our technology to make their website easier to read!

If there's a lesson to be learned from this N=1, it's that shorter is sweeter when it comes to pitches.

1: http://www.springwise.com

2: http://www.beelinereader.com/individual

[eruci]

Now they will do that for you for a $89 fee. "LET US SUBMIT FOR YOU 89$" A startup about startups about startups.

[smt88]

It sounds like the lesson you learned was to find and pitch potential customers. If that isn't the top of a founder's priority list, there's a fundamental problem occurring.

[gnicholas]

Any site that has a decent amount of text on it is a potential customer of ours, so all of the websites we submitted to could have licensed our tech.

The only difference is that I used a short pitch for the last ones and long pitches for the first ones.