Where to list a Nigerian product

A listing is an address. Somebody searching your category, or checking whether you are real before they pay you, can find something you wrote instead of nothing. What a listing does not do is bring people who were not already looking. Treat every destination below as a page that answers a question somebody is already asking about you.

Most of them take under ten minutes. The work worth doing carefully is the one-line description. It is what a reader sees in a list of forty products, and most directories will not let you edit it as often as you would like.

Product Hunt runs on launch day attention: you post, and the day decides how much you get. It rewards a product a stranger can use unaided. Hold it until your sign-up flow works without you explaining it.

Show HN is a text post and a link, and the comments are the point. Expect the first reply to be the hardest question about your product, which makes it the cheapest user research you will get.

Indie Hackers and BetaList both keep a permanent page for a product, which matters more than the traffic on the day. AlternativeTo is worth the form if people already compare you to a tool they know, because it is where they look for the comparison.

Crunchbase is the one an investor or a journalist checks. It is a company record rather than a product launch, so fill it before you need it.

A global board sorts you against everything. A local one sorts you against the products a Nigerian buyer is actually choosing between, which is a shorter and more useful list.

Kampe Tools catalogues Nigerian-built products by what they do. It is where the three hundred products in this site’s own directory came from.

Beyond the directories, Nigerian founders are read in communities rather than catalogues: the WhatsApp and Telegram groups for your sector, and the newsletters your buyers already open. None of those can be submitted to in ten minutes. They are usually where the first real users come from.

Every form asks for roughly the same things, so write them once. A one-line description under about twelve words, a longer paragraph, a square logo, a link that works without a sign-in, and the address you want replies at. Keep the description identical everywhere until you have a reason to change it. A product described four ways is four products as far as a search engine is concerned.

Claim nothing you cannot show. User counts and revenue figures in a launch blurb are the first thing a sceptical reader checks and the fastest way to lose one.

Oust is a board where products rank by what has been paid for them, and the price to take any position is published beside it. Three hundred Nigerian products are already listed here, unclaimed, seeded from Kampe Tools so their makers could find them.

Being listed costs nothing and holds no rank. You can look for yours in the directory, prove it is yours, and correct anything wrong with it without paying. Paying is what puts a listing on a board, and how that ranking works is worth understanding before you decide it is for you.