What is Postmake?

Postmake is a directory of tools, products, services, and resources curated to help you choose the best option for your projects or businesses. All tools are manually curated and reviewed before being added to the directory. You can also submit your own tool to the directory if it's a good fit.

Tools are sorted by tags, and these are laid out on a roadmap that breaks down a typical project's lifecycle into the most common stages. You can also search the directory by name or category, and use results to find and compare between similar listings.

Great, another curated list!

While it might seem that every couple of days a "curated list for xxx" post is made to Product Hunt or Hacker News, Postmake aims to be a directory of tools, rather than a curated list. We're not looking for the "best" – we’re looking at "your options".

When I use the word curated here, I mean that all tools are manually reviewed and tagged, and their listing page set up to make sure it's a fit for the directory. The directory is frequently scanned for dead links and outdated info.

How do you get listed on Postmake?

The most popular products and services in a specific niche are listed under a specific tag. If you were already listed, please get in touch and we’ll give you access to edit your page.

You can also submit your product or service to be added to the directory. You can learn more about how to submit tools here.

Why aren't submissions free?

Postmake is bootstrapped project that was built to help fellow small business owners and independent founders find and compare between the available options.

In order to maintain this directory and keep it up to date, the project needs to be supported. Most similar curated lists are quickly abandoned by their supporters because there's little motivation to keep going – which is a shame considering how helpful and popular these lists often are.

By charging for submissions, we ensure the following:

• The directory can be continuously maintained and improved upon
• Eliminating the noise – only serious founders are willing to pay a price to get their projects or services listed
• Access to the directory and all its content remain free

How is this different from other product discoverability tools, like Product Hunt or Capterra?

When you're looking for something to use to solve a particular problem, most often the first thing you do is search for something on Google. But over the years, Google search results have become riddled with content marketing articles, tutorials, ads, and "top 10" articles that are more often than not largely useless. Popular websites and publications use their SEO rankings to promote particular products or businesses, and often there are better options.

With all this noise floating around, "curated lists" have now become a common way to compile most popular tools and services in a given niche. Even popular websites like Product Hunt have introduced "alternative to" lists that weight similar tools together.

Postmake is an attempt to compile all these lists into one huge directory. We're not particularly looking for the "best", as that's a very subjective opinion; rather, we're looking to compile all available options, highlight the most important information in a useful manner, and letting you decide on the most suitable option.

To make sure Postmake doesn't become a graveyard of dead links, as often happens with similar websites, we're making sure the directory is constantly maintained and updated. We do this by doing a couple of things:

• Allowing anyone to submit new tools to the directory, but charging for submissions. Charging money is the easiest way to filter out the noise by making sure project owners are serious about their work. This immediately eliminates fun side projects and gimmicks. It's also the easiest way to support the costs of maintaining the website.
• Focusing on the directory's presentation. While popular product discoverability tools like Product Hunt and Capterra do a great job at helping with discoverability, they suffer from a huge problem: they’re hit oriented. With a low barrier to entry, it’s very easy to get listed on these services; this means the competition is very fierce, and only tools that "make it to the front page" see any benefits. Even products that make it to the top are only put on the spotlight for a very short while, and are then lost within a thousand others. Anybody that made it to the top on Product Hunt or Hacker News is very familiar with this graph:

Unfortunately products usually live most of their lives in the “long tail”, or the yellow portion of the graph. The short green bursts of traffic are seldom enough to sustain products.

Postmake doesn't have a "front page". All tools are tagged, and tags can be browsed either by using a search engine, or by using the "roadmap". We're still experimenting with how results are ranked, but they always list all tools in their respective tags.

This way, users are actively browsing for a particular solution for their problem, not casually searching through top trending tools for that particular day.

Who's behind Postmake?

Early on in my bootstrapping and side-project-gigs journey, I often had to spend a long amount of time figuring what can of service or tool to use for finishing a particular task. I often didn't even know what I'm looking for, either – until I would run to some obscure forum post or tutorial that would point me in the correct direction, and I'd think to myself "oh so that's how people do this particular thing".

I've had the idea to build something like a "dictionary" of tools for a while. Popular product discovery tools like Product Hunt and communities like Indie Hackers helped when I was starting out, and the recent trend of "curated lists for X" were (and still are!) great references. But between outdated lists and poor presentation, I still felt like I could build something of my own.

Postmake is something I've been building on and off for the past couple of years, but since I haven't heard anything but positive feedback about the project, I decided to work on it a little more seriously. It's entirely bootstrapped, and it's recently become profitable.

You can learn more about me and my work here. Please feel free to reach out to me with anything you might want!