A startup has three things working against it in link building. No domain authority, no press relationships, and no budget for an agency retainer. If buying that expertise is on the table, our roundup of SaaS link building agencies covers what a retainer actually gets you.
It also has two advantages nobody talks about. It can move faster than any incumbent, and it has something genuinely new to say, which is the only reason anyone links to anything.
These fifteen tactics are ordered by how quickly each returns a link. The first six can be started this week and none of them require a budget.
How this list was put together
Every platform named here was loaded on its live site in August 2026 and screenshotted, so the tools mentioned resolve and are real. Anything that returned a dead page or a parked domain was cut.
Two exceptions worth naming: Product Hunt and G2 both returned bot-blocking errors to our crawler rather than a page, so they appear here without a capture. They are named because a launch directory list without them would be incomplete, not because we could verify them to the same standard as the rest.
No tactic here involves buying links from a private blog network, and nothing on this page is presented as a guarantee.
Set expectations before you start
A new domain does not rank because of links alone, and the first ten links change very little. What they do is get you out of the sandbox where Google has no signal about you at all.
Plan on six months before links move rankings and twelve before the compounding starts. Any vendor promising otherwise is selling a package rather than a result.
This week, no budget
1. Claim the listings you are already entitled to
Software directories, industry associations, your accelerator's portfolio page, your investors' portfolio pages, the "built with" pages of every tool in your stack. Capterra, Crunchbase, AlternativeTo and the category-specific directories in your niche.
Why start here: these are the only links nobody can refuse you, and they take an afternoon in total.
The catch: most pass little authority on their own. They matter because they establish that you exist as an entity, which everything else builds on.
2. Join a backlink exchange network
The hardest part of link building at zero is finding sites willing to link at all, because you have no relationships and nothing to trade. Distribb's backlink exchange solves the sourcing half by matching sites in relevant niches that have already agreed to link on merit, so placements are editorial and you can see every link.
Honest limitation: this gives you links from other members of the network, not from TechCrunch or your industry's trade press. A profile made only of exchanged links is a thin one, and it does not substitute for tactics 7 through 12 below. Use it as the base layer while the slower tactics mature.
3. Write testimonials for every tool you pay for
You already use ten pieces of software. Most of them want customer quotes for their homepage or case study section, and most of those pages link back.
Why it works: you are giving them something they need, which is why the acceptance rate is unusually high.
Do it properly: a specific testimonial with a number in it gets used. A generic one gets filed.
4. Answer journalist requests
Reporters post requests for expert sources every day, and a founder with genuine operating experience is exactly what they want. Qwoted, Featured and SourceBottle all run this and all have free tiers.
Best for: founders who can write a tight three-paragraph answer quickly.
The catch: hit rate is low and it rewards speed. Answer within the first hour or do not bother, and expect to send twenty pitches for a handful of placements.
5. Find your unlinked mentions
Once anyone has written about you, some of them named you without linking. Set an alert on your brand name, then email the author asking for the link.
Why it is the easiest link there is: the writer already decided you were worth mentioning. You are asking for a formatting change, not a favour.
Where to look: Ahrefs and Semrush both have unlinked mention reports, and a Google alert on your brand name is free.
6. Launch on the directories that matter in your category
Product Hunt, BetaList, Hacker News Show HN, Indie Hackers, and the two or three directories specific to your vertical. A launch is a link and, occasionally, a wave of secondary coverage that is worth more than the launch itself.
The catch: a launch is a one-time event and the traffic disappears in three days. Treat the link and any coverage it triggers as the return, not the signups.
This quarter, still cheap
7. Publish one piece of original data
The single highest-return asset a startup can build. You have data nobody else has: your own usage numbers, a survey of your customers, pricing across your category, anything internal that generalises.
Why it works: writers need something to cite and there are only so many sources. Being the source is the whole game.
The catch: it has to be genuinely new. A repackaged industry statistic gets no citations, and a survey of forty people gets treated accordingly.
8. Build one free tool
A calculator, a checker, a generator, anything that solves a small adjacent problem in one click. Free tools earn links for years because people link to a thing that works, not to an article about the thing.
Best for: technical founders, where a weekend of work produces an asset with a five-year life.
The catch: it must be genuinely free and usable without signup. A tool gated behind an email form gets no links.
9. Guest post where you would have written anyway
Pick eight publications your customers actually read, and pitch one specific article you are qualified to write. Not a list of topics, one article with an angle.
Why the hit rate is better than you expect: editors are short of contributors with real operating experience, and a founder who has done the thing is rarer than a freelance writer who has researched it.
The catch: it is a real writing commitment each time. Two good guest posts beat ten thin ones.
10. Get on podcasts
Show notes almost always link. Podcasts in your category are constantly looking for guests, and the bar for a founder with a specific story is low.
Best for: anyone more comfortable talking than writing.
The catch: it takes an hour per appearance and the link quality varies. Check that the show actually publishes show notes on its own domain before saying yes.
11. Answer where your customers already ask
Reddit, niche forums, Slack and Discord communities, and the comment sections of the publications above. Most of these links are nofollow and that is fine.
Why it still counts: it produces traffic, it produces brand searches, and it is where the writers who eventually cite you find you first.
The catch: this only works if you participate genuinely. Drive-by link drops get removed and damage the brand.
12. Run outreach properly, once you have the asset
Outreach without an asset is spam. Outreach pointing at the data study from tactic 7 or the free tool from tactic 8 is a legitimate email that people reply to.
Respona, BuzzStream and Pitchbox all handle prospecting, sending and follow-up. Hunter finds the addresses.
The catch: budget for the tool and for the hours. Outreach is a job, not a subscription.
The slow ones, start now anyway
13. Build the founder's own presence
Links to a personal profile, podcast appearances, conference bios and quoted commentary accumulate around a person faster than around a young company. That reputation is what makes tactics 4, 9 and 10 work at all.
The catch: it is tied to the individual, which is worth thinking about before making it the centre of the strategy.
14. Sponsor something small and local or niche
A meetup, a newsletter, an open source project, a community event. These carry links, cost less than an agency month, and reach an audience that is actually yours.
The catch: treat it as marketing that happens to link. Sponsorships bought purely for the link are usually overpriced and increasingly discounted.
15. Make the product itself linkable
Embeddable widgets, a public status page, an open source component, a genuinely useful changelog, a public API doc. Things people reference because they need to point at them.
Why it is last and also first: it takes the longest to pay off and it is the only tactic that keeps working with no ongoing effort.
The order we would actually run this in
Week one, tactics 1, 2 and 3. Week two, set up 5 and start 4. Month two, start 7, because it takes longest and everything from 9 to 12 gets easier once it exists.
Ignore anything that promises volume. Twenty links from sources you could name publicly beat two hundred you would not want a journalist to look at, and the risks of the second approach are covered in our piece on tiered link building.
What to do next
If sourcing is your bottleneck rather than execution, that is the part Distribb's backlink exchange handles, and our comparison of backlink exchange platforms covers the alternatives if you would rather use something else.
If the bottleneck is having anything worth linking to, start at tactic 7. Everything else on this list gets easier once one asset exists, and our guide to building backlinks for a small business covers the local and offline routes a startup usually skips.
Four neighbouring pages cover the parts this list compresses. Link building techniques is the general version, white hat link building techniques covers what stays safe as you scale, link bait examples shows assets that actually earned links, and link building for ecommerce is the version for a store rather than a product. On tooling, see link building software.