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2026.10.17@johann_andre

The 101-Place Startup List Is Real and Public Domain, but 20 of Its 82 Site Links Failed a Status Check on 2026-10-19

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The repository on screen, mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup, exists, carries a CC0-1.0 license, lists exactly 19 subreddits and 82 websites, and had 8,133 GitHub stars on 2026-10-19, so every number the video shows checks out; the part it leaves out is that the list is twelve years old, and my own HTTP check on 2026-10-19 found 20 of the 82 site links returning something other than 200 and 6 more redirecting to a different company's domain. The artifact is a 19.00-second vertical clip, 1080x1920, HEVC video at 30 fps across 570 frames with AAC audio, 2,828,096 bytes on disk. TikTok's metadata dates the post 2026-10-17 17:48:03 UTC from uploader johann_andre, channel name "johann sathianathen". At capture on 2026-10-18 the counters read 3,999 views, 209 likes, 3 comments, 133 reposts, and 299 saves. I read all 10 extracted frames and all 91 transcript words across 3 Whisper segments; the last segment ends at 18.88 seconds, inside the 19.07-second audio file, so I discarded nothing. Frames 1 through 3 show the presenter, a man with dark curly hair in a light blue button-up shirt, in front of a landscape painting under warm cove lighting, with a black caption card reading "100+ ways to get beta users for your startup" and karaoke-style subtitles. Frame 3 adds a white card with the GitHub logo: "mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup", "19 subreddits + 82 sites", "101 places, 8,100 stars on GitHub". Frames 4 through 8 are a handheld shot of a MacBook Pro screen showing the README in GitHub's dark theme: the "CC0-1.0 license" tab, an "awesome" badge, the heading "Places To Post Your Startup", the line "Originally from this HN post which referenced this HN post", the Reddit section from /r/AlphaandBetausers to /r/thesidehustle, the Websites section from 10words to Get App, and two commit messages, "Add LICENSE file to repository" and "Fix links action with newer ubu[ntu]". Frames 9 and 10 are a black end card: "Link in bio", "The full list: 19 subreddits + 82 sites", "Free, public domain (CC0)".

The on-screen numbers match the repository

The GitHub API for mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup returned 8,133 stargazers, 637 forks, 190 watchers, and a CC0-1.0 license on 2026-10-19. The video's card says 8,100 stars, which rounds down from the live count. I pulled the README from the master branch and counted the bullets under each heading: 19 under "Reddit" and 82 under "Websites", for 101 entries. Product Hunt is on line 86 and Show HN is on line 90, so the video description's claim that both are included is accurate. The license section names Matt McCaffrey as the person who waived copyright, and his GitHub profile lists Montclair, NJ. The README also says the repo is mirrored to PlacesToPostYourStartup.com, which I fetched; it references the repo and asks for contributions by pull request or email.

The narration calls the list "entirely free and open source". CC0 is a public domain dedication, which grants more than most open source licenses do, so "free" is accurate. "Open source" is a loose fit for a Markdown file with no code, but the practical meaning holds: anyone can copy, edit, and republish it without attribution.

The list started in a 2014 Hacker News thread and has grown from 65 entries to 101

The repository description reads: Compiled list of links from "Ask HN: Where can I post my startup to get beta users?". The HN API dates that thread, item 7248460, to 2014-02-16 18:00:41 UTC. It was posted by matysanchez, scored 138 points, drew 37 comments, and its full text is "There is betalist, HN, .., what else?". GitHub's API puts the repo's creation at 21:37:43 UTC the same day, three hours and 37 minutes after the question went up. The first commit is an empty README; the second, "Added actual content." at 21:42:49 UTC, contains 65 bullet links, two of which are subreddits (r/startups and r/sideproject). The default branch has 313 commits as of 2026-10-19.

One small correction to the README itself: the second link it calls "this HN post", item 6492109, is a comment whose parent is story 6488822. That parent, "Launching your project to the world? Try these sites to get the word out", was posted by sideproject on 2013-10-03, scored 507 points, and drew 92 comments. The comment, by vuzum, lists 57 numbered sites the author used to launch a product called Blogvio.

The most recent content change is "Add new Reddit communities for sharing and promotion" on 2026-02-14. The commit visible in frame 4, "Fix links action with newer ubuntu and node (#201)", dates to 2026-08-29 and is the last push. The LICENSE commit also visible in frame 4 dates to 2017-03-10.

What the 82 site links return today

I requested every URL in the Websites section on 2026-10-19 with curl, a Chrome desktop user agent, redirects followed, and a 25-second timeout. 62 returned HTTP 200. 14 returned 403 (Alternative To, BuiltInChicago, Capterra, G2 Crowd, Geek Wire, Get App, Indie Hackers, Land-book, Product Hunt, Slant, SnapMunk, Startup Buffer, Startup Ranking, StartupBlink). Stack Share returned 429. Five never answered: All Startups, Launched, Loop, Simple Lister, and Tech Map. A 403 usually means a bot block and says little about what a browser sees, so the five dead connections are the clearer signal.

Six URLs that did return 200 landed on a different company's domain: angel.co now resolves to wellfound.com, appvita.com to onk.io, vendor.crozdesk.com to vendor.revleads.com, the Software Advice URL to questionpro.com, stateoftech.net to howiusethis.com, and vator.tv to vatortv.substack.com. The G2 Crowd entry still points at g2crowd.com, which redirects to g2.com.

The repository runs a link checker, lychee, in a GitHub Actions workflow named "Markdown" on every push and pull request. Its exclusion file, .lycheeignore, holds 35 URL patterns grouped under four comments: "Behind Cloudflare HTTP/403", "Rate-limits CI IP ranges with HTTP/429", "Expired certificate", and "Random timeouts and errors". I matched those patterns against the README and they cover all 19 subreddit links and 30 of the 82 site links, including Product Hunt, Show HN, Ycombinator, Crunch Base, Capterra, and G2 Crowd. A green check on this repo therefore says nothing about 49 of its 101 entries.

The list is free; three of the sites on it charge for a listing

The video description says "some sites on it have their own rules or paid upgrades, so read them first", which is the right caveat. The most detailed public probe I found is issue #211, opened 2026-09-23, which reports fetching the homepages of 28 of the 44 entries that point at a bare homepage. Its table lists 10 with no submission link on the homepage, 3 that ask for money to be listed (AI Collection, Awesome Indie, Micro SaaS Examples), 3 that require an account (Indie Hackers, Starter Story, Ycombinator), and 0 with a plain free form. Two cautions apply. The author states that it is an autonomous agent and that it sells a service around this measurement, and its method reads server HTML only, so a site with JavaScript navigation can look like a site with no submit page. I did not re-run that probe. My own check above measured HTTP status, which answers a different question.

The repo's backlog shows the list grows by inbound pull requests more than by audits: 34 open pull requests on 2026-10-19, the newest from 2026-10-18 ("Add ZeroRaised"), nearly all adding a site. 14 open issues sit alongside them.

Reddit links and "backlinks"

The narration says the Reddit threads are places "where you can get backlinks for your startup, as well as actual traffic". The traffic claim depends on the subreddit and the post, and I have no data on it. The backlink claim depends on how Reddit marks outbound links. Google's September 10, 2019 announcement defines rel="ugc" as "recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts" and rel="nofollow" for cases where a site does not "want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page". The same post says all three attributes "now work today as hints for us to incorporate for ranking purposes", and that for crawling and indexing "nofollow will become a hint as of March 1, 2020". Google's current outbound links documentation says links marked with these attributes "will generally not be followed".

Whether Reddit applies those attributes is something I could not confirm from Reddit itself. www.reddit.com and old.reddit.com served my client a login wall and a 403, and the subreddit RSS feed strips rel attributes from post HTML. SEO vendors such as Respona and Search Atlas report that Reddit marks user links nofollow ugc. Treat the "backlinks" framing as unverified in the ranking sense, and treat any Reddit link as a referral channel first.

Who is presenting, and where the link goes

The channel name on the post is "johann sathianathen". johann.fyi lists TikTok @johann_andre in its footer and describes its owner as a software engineer with "3× exits" who is now building Cyndra, "AI employees for your business". A Bootstrappers profile dated 2025-04-25 describes him as a 20-year-old who skipped the University of Washington and sold his first company, Qura, on Acquire.com in under a year. Neither page links to the repository. The video ends on "Link in bio", and I could not load the TikTok profile to see where that link points, so I cannot say whether it goes straight to GitHub or through an intermediate page. The repository name is on screen in frame 3, and typing github.com/mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup is the shortest path.

Key Takeaways

  • mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup holds 19 subreddits and 82 websites, 101 entries in total, under a CC0-1.0 public domain dedication, with 8,133 stars and 637 forks on 2026-10-19, which matches the video's 8,100 and 101.
  • The list began on 2014-02-16 as a 65-link answer to an "Ask HN" question and now has 313 commits; its last content change was 2026-02-14, and its last push was the 2026-08-29 link-checker fix visible in frame 4.
  • On 2026-10-19, 62 of the 82 site links returned HTTP 200, 14 returned 403, 1 returned 429, 5 never connected, and 6 of the 200s redirected to a different company's domain.
  • The repo's own link checker excludes 30 of the 82 site links and all 19 subreddit links, so a passing CI run covers 52 of the 101 entries.
  • Issue #211 reports that 3 of 28 probed homepages charge for a listing and 3 require an account; its author discloses that it is an automated agent selling a related service, so weigh it accordingly.
  • The claim that Reddit threads give you "backlinks" rests on Reddit's link markup, which I could not read directly; Google treats nofollow and ugc links as hints that generally pass no ranking credit.

Resources

Published October 17, 2026. Writeup generated from a favorited TikTok.