Basic Link Building: A Skeptical Engineer’s Experiment

I am an engineer, not a marketing person. But I have a problem. When I show people Happy Coder (my mobile app for Claude Code), they Google it right there in front of me. Nothing shows up. Not even when they search “happy coder happy.engineering”. Every time this happens, it hurts my credibility.

I started reading marketing advice online. Marketers make everything sound easy. They say just post regularly, make graphics, create demo videos. I tried this. It is hard. Making a graphic takes hours when you do not know the tools. Recording a demo with good audio quality is not trivial. Writing something new to post every day is difficult. The marketers do these things in 20 minutes. For me it takes much longer and the results look obviously bad.

But I keep trying different approaches. One recommendation kept appearing from multiple sources: submit your product to directory websites. This supposedly helps Google understand what your product is and rank it for your name. When someone searches “mobile app for Claude Code and Codex”, Happy Coder should show up.

So I am running an experiment. Below is a table where I track every directory submission. Which ones accept it? Which ones ask for money? Does this actually work? I am skeptical, but I will find out.

This is an open source project. Other contributors can use this index to know where all our profiles exist. When we release a new version, someone can go through this list and update the screenshots or descriptions. If you want to help, you can see what needs updating and who last touched each entry.

There were plenty of domains that were not relavant to posting an AI developer tool