So you want to start a startup that does anywhere between 2000 and 10000 a month passive revenue, something that you only have to work on 10 15, 20 minutes a week, but you don't have a lot of money to start.
Maybe you have $200, $500, $1,000.
Well, what kind of business would you start?
I would recommend an online directory.
A directory is basically a website with a bunch of different links and data.
And in this episode I talk about how you can use cloud code to actually build an online directory that is going to get traffic on autopilot.
And I brought on Frey and Frey is Mr. Directory.
And he shows us step by step how to use cloud code to create a very big directory.
I really enjoyed having him just take us through the entire process.
What are the prompts he uses?
How to think about data enrichment?
How do you think about cleaning the data so that you can create a online directory that generates traffic every single day?
Now, I know what some people are thinking.
They're thinking, that's really boring.
An online directory?
Come on.
I want to build a mobile app.
I want to build a SaaS product.
But what they miss is that building an online directory is going to get you thousands of visitors online.
Thank you.
This is an incredibly important yet boring episode of the podcast, but those who stick to the end, I think, are going to have an unfair advantage.
I totally recommend you take this link and share it with a friend, because this is alpha that is not shared anywhere else on the planet.
You're in for a treat.
Enjoy this episode with Frey.
It is a treat because we have Frey on the pod.
By the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of it?
Yeah, thanks for having me on, by the way, Greg.
Yeah, by the end, I really want people to have a solid understanding of how to use cloud code to build AI-coded directories, with an emphasis on what I think is the hardest part, which is getting the valuable data.
And we're going to go deep on that.
But first, I think it's only fair we run it back.
The last time I was on the pod, we played a game where I showed you a few cool directories and you guessed the traffic.
So...
If you're down, I'll share three cool directories.
And, if you want, you can try to guess the way that these monetize as well, just because I think that'd be pretty fun.
So I'll go ahead and share my screen and we can dive into it.
Let's do it.
I can't say no to a game.
Frey, you know that.
All right.
So the first one is parting.com.
And we can see it's a funeral home directory.
This is kind of what it looks like.
Click around.
And how much traffic do you think that this website makes?
Well, it does say it's the number one.
If you go back to the homepage, I think it says the number one funeral home comparison website for price and quality.
I'm going to guess it gets at least 100,000 visits a month.
That is a solid guess.
Let's take a look.
All right.
All right.
61,000 organic monthly visitors.
So pretty close.
And what's really cool about this directory.
I'll kind of share a little bit about this.
One is, By the way, any guesses on how this might monetize?
I'm just curious before I go into this.
Well, two things.
I did see some ads pop up, but I don't think that's where they're getting the bulk of the revenue.
I would say it's a lead gen directory, so they sell leads to funeral homes.
Yeah, that is partially it.
Definitely the ads don't make up the bulk of the revenue, so...
This is reported to do over a million dollars a year in revenue.
There are some quotes that go up to five million dollars, but they even raised money.
They raised one point five million dollars in 2021.
But the bulk of their money actually comes from a software.
And if we look at parting pro, this is kind of their vertical sass that they offer for cremation arrangement software for funeral homes.
Um, what's really like interesting about this is like this software just helps them do things like drop shipping urns, like that's, that's a thing, and then it's kind of got an agency back end where they just help you create the website and then do online marketing and basically lead generation.
And I think we talked about this last time, but I still believe that building a directory and creating a micro SaaS or vertical SaaS is a super solid way to go about it.
And with Cloud Code, it's never been easier.
But the agency directory combo is a potent one and I see it all the time.
Some of the biggest directories that I know monetize this way.
But yeah, this is what's bringing in the majority of it.
So yeah, that's the first one, solid guess.
Let's move on to the second one.
Drag it over here.
This one's called aplaceformom.com and senior living, massive industry.
What are your thoughts on this one?
Is it just for moms or for dads, too?
You know, what about dad?
That's what I'm saying.
It's messed up.
It's messed up.
It's for everyone, hopefully.
Yeah.
I would say 50,000 visits a month or more.
OK.
And are you thinking lead generation as well?
Yes.
There's a huge business around lead gen for senior living.
It's a huge business.
And there's huge publicly traded REITs real estate investment trusts that you can see how much they spend on marketing.
But yeah, it's a big business.
Massive space.
And Care.com, that's the famous one.
Let's take a look.
So placeformom.com is getting 824,000 organic monthly visitors.
The estimates on this are wild.
Some websites claim that this makes anywhere between $100 million a year, $500 million a year.
My gut tells me like $50 million a year is probably right where I feel like it's more accurate.
And the way they monetize is basically purely from lead generation.
So they have 18,000 or over 18,000 senior living homes that are listed on their directory.
And they basically have all of these kind of sneaky ways to collect information and then pass them off to these senior living homes where they collect a portion of the first month's rent or like a fixed fee for every referral that they give.
Um, So just a beastly, but very simple and straightforward directory and like super classic.
Like I think most people think of lead generation when people think of directories.
So I love this one.
It's just so well made.
It's also built on WordPress, I believe.
So for the WordPress users out there, this is some inspiration.
So just a really cool one.
And I'll leave the last one over here.
The last one's gonna be gasbuddy.com.
It's a crowdsourced directory to give you gas prices near you.
So if you type in like a random zip code, you can just find the gas prices, save some money.
And it's as simple as that.
So what are you thinking on this one as far as traffic?
This is a big one, dude.
I see right here 100 million downloads and counting.
I've heard of Gas Buddy.
I think that this data moat is a really interesting one just as a business.
I'm a co-founder of an agency called LCA and we build some really popular AI products.
One that we're working on right now is called Stretch AI, so it's grocery prices around you and it's by one of the top guys at Waze, which is also a data play.
So anyways, point is, I think that if you're number one, you have the data moat, this is getting, I'm going to say three million, no, I'm going to say two million visits a month.
That's a good amount.
Okay, yeah, but that's actually a really good guess.
And I totally agree.
I think on the surface, this looks simplistic, but everyone needs gas.
I mean, pretty much everyone.
But this directory is getting 11 million organic monthly visitors and they monetize in two main ways.
They make a ton of money on ads.
So with this amount of traffic and tier one traffic coming from the US and Canada.
Yeah, they're probably.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're pulling in like on the lower end, 30000 a month just in ads, which if we clicked around we'd start seeing.
But their big play is actually a debit card.
And so if we go over to GasBuddy Plus Premium, they have this debit card that they partnered up with MasterCard to create.
And it basically allows you to save money on gas.
It's $10 a month or $99 a year.
And so they have a ton of members here.
I love this one.
This is my favorite one of the list because...
I think crowdsourcing gas prices is so simple but extremely difficult.
So I went back to 2004.
They started in 2002, but I wanted to understand how they even incentivize people to get gas prices, because that's like why would anyone want to take time out of their day?
And Back in 2004, all they did was create a public leaderboard, which they still have today, if we go to gas tools here.
We can see all these people, Prince33 leading the pack.
And they basically did giveaways.
So in 2004, they gave away e-bikes.
And the way that it would work is that if you updated or reported any gas prices, you'd get like 150 points.
And then once you reach 1,000 points, that gives you one entry into the giveaway.
And they were like, yeah, you could get an e-bike.
So I thought that was super interesting.
It's like very simple psychology.
Everyone loves a public leaderboard.
We all can't be Usain Bolt, but if you want to be the best gas price reporter in the world, then you know you can be that.
And let me see if I can quickly find the Wayback Machine tab here.
Yeah, so check this out.
I thought this was kind of cool.
So this is a snapshot from 2006 and we can see this little leaderboard here.
Prince33 was active back 20 years ago.
Gary Indiana, shout out. but now, you know, consistency, persistence has gotten him to number one.
And what's insane is this guy hasn't missed a day in almost like in over 5,800 days.
Like this guy wakes up and he's passionate about gas prices apparently.
Um, and, uh, it's just insane to see the super fans these days.
They do give you the giveaways and e-bikes anymore.
They give away a hundred dollar prepaid debit cards for gas.
Um, but I just thought this was super interesting and it's actually a rare case where the directory monetization is super aligned with the reason why users are coming to this website.
Because a place for momcom partyingcom.
They have to go and do outbound sales to reach out to business owners and create an offer that way.
But these guys just were really creative with it.
So I love this example.
And I wanted to show you these three, because all three of these directories execute this framework that I think all successful directories do, which is they help people save time, save money or help people make money.
And if you look on any one of these listing pages here, we can see more specifically they've done a really good job with bringing price transparency as a form of data enrichment in areas where it's just really hard to get pricing information.
And I think this is actually a massive opportunity for directories.
It's incredibly unscalable in manual, but there's so many industries and niches where price transparency just doesn't exist.
Tons of boring ones.
And so for me this year, I think like, Data can be a moat.
It can be a differentiator.
And price transparency is a big one because it's so hard to get.
So that kind of leads me into what I wanted to show you guys today, which is how to get valuable data.
And let me just switch tabs over here to what I built.
Let's do this.
Good segue because I'm bought in on the thesis.
I agree.
I think the data is the moat.
I also think that you can use AI in clever ways to get the data.
I'm intrigued.
Yeah, it's it's it's definitely the most boring part.
And the reason it was actually kind of hard to decide what I wanted to talk about, because with cloud code you're doing so many things that I wanted to go deep rather than wide.
But yeah, I would say for directories, the moat is definitely data and your SEO, like if you have really strong backlinks.
But yeah, like also just quickly.
Another reason i wanted to show you those three directories is because i think the number one question that i saw reading the comments from the last pod was how do you monetize these directories?
And the answer is really unsexy.
But it depends on the niche and i don't think it has to be display ads or legion.
It obviously can be really creative.
I've seen tons of different offers created on the back end of directories but um Yeah, it's super cool.
So anyways, I built this directory in four days.
And it literally started from a raw massive, unorganized CSV of data of over 70000 rows that I scraped for the entire country for port-a-potty suppliers.
And I just wanted to start with an example where I show you what a directory might look like with high quality data and one that looks yeah.
And what one would look like with low quality data.
So let's just start with this one.
This is my cloud code directory, luxury restroom, trailers, boring, but awesome niche.
People are spending a thousand dollars, $2,000 a day, renting these out for their weddings.
You know there's corporate events, film sets, really all sorts of stuff, just kind of showing you what you can create in record time.
And, um, Yeah, the listing looks great.
Super, super clear with the amenities and features.
We have some images, the types of stalls that you can go and rent.
And then, of course, the lead form, some service areas.
And I think this looks solid.
But let me take you a year and a half back when I didn't know Cloud Code and I created this beauty.
This is portapottymatch.com.
I built this in WordPress and...
It still has lorem ipsum on the front page.
You know, we got some listing pages that are looking pretty sparse, and all of this is just AI generated like sentence structures.
All the same,
It's a bad directory.
It's ugly, it's bad.
All these images are the same for every listing.
So I built this thinking like no one could reasonably trust this directory and like inbound as a lead right.
But to my surprise, I just built this and left it up and I got like some leads coming in.
And this is one example here kind of blocked out the email, but I actually got a bunch of leads that just inbounded.
This guy named Eric wanted a restroom trailer with multiple stalls.
He has a film shoot, so that was kind of a cool way to look at the use cases.
Another film shoot guy coming in asking for a trailer for a film shoot.
Martha looking for a reasonably priced porta potty with a sink or hand wash station.
And then this is the big one.
I got a lead from the New Mexico State Fair.
This is the order that they wanted.
And this is like $20,000 plus of porta potty slash luxury restroom trailers that they wanted.
So just an insane lead.
And I was surprised.
So, despite my really poor data curation, It kind of just showed me that there is a massive need in this space.
And it's not really easy to go and compare the different port-a-potty types if you're in the market for one.
And there's also a vast amount of use cases.
But I knew that things were kind of falling through the cracks.
And so if all these leads inbounded with this crappy looking directory with lorem ipsum on the front page, what would it look like if I actually built this thing out, now that I know cloud code?
So I vibe coded this kind of how I built this directory that outlines this seven step process on how I'm using cloud code and an open source GitHub repo called Crawl for AI to handle any kind of data curation.
So This is where I kinda just wanna show people how to tackle that data side, because I've seen probably 1000 or 2000 people build directories in the last year.
And 100%, this is where people either quit or give up.
And I totally empathize.
There was a point in my life where I was waking up and being like all right, I'm going to sit down in this chair for six hours and click on this website and just manually verify if this is a luxury restroom trailer.
And it was hell.
Like, it was awful.
Terrible, terrible use of time.
But as you can see from these stats...
I mean, I built this in four days, like I mentioned, I probably saved over 2000 hours in what would have been manual data cleaning, manual data enrichment, also record low costs.
I mean I would have to hire a developer to like write custom Python scripts before, and it's just not necessary nowadays.
So I built this in under 250 bucks.
$100 of that was my Cloud Code Max subscription.
Another $100 was for the data.
And then 50 for some Cloud API credits to do some deep cleaning, which we'll talk about in a moment.
So all you really need to get started is your directory niche.
Mine's Luxury Restroom Trailers.
You need Cloud Code.
And you want an understanding of...
What drives decision making?
What do people actually need to make a decision around a luxury restroom trailer?
And you can just achieve that by looking at Reddit forums.
I think TikTok's great Facebook groups Instagram, anywhere where the conversation online is being had around the topic that you're building your directory around.
As we can see, this whole process I'm about to go over is just the second step.
For me, I think my structured approach to building directories starts with finding the idea, collecting the data, building the website, SEO optimization and then figuring out monetization.
So let's just start with the first step.
The first step is just scraping the data.
I just went straight to outscraper.
I don't think...
There's nothing new here.
I went over this in the last pod, but Outscraper is still the cheapest option for me.
I've used Appify and other kind of alternatives, but just keep it simple.
I think Outscraper is a great place to start.
And there's tons of videos online where people can learn how to scrape data from Google Maps using Outscraper.
So I went and did this.
I got 71,000 rows and potential listings. and cover the entire state.
I build nationwide directories and the whole game plan is to sell leads in this high-tech niche.
So pretty straightforward.
The problem is 71000 rows is massive and we definitely have to do a lot of cleaning.
As far as data goes,
So this is when I introduced Cloud Code into the mix and I used to have to manually clean data and I would have all of the obvious junk data removed.
So remove things like listings with no business name address city state, permanently closed ones and any like obvious ones that don't relate to my niche, like big box retailers.
And so this is the prompt that I wrote.
And obviously, people are going to have to kind of retrofit this to your own niche.
But I'm just telling Cloud Code, here are my five CSVs.
Go ahead and just look at every single one and use this criteria to clean the data.
And so this simple prompt got me from 71K down to 20,000 listings.
And if you are going to use this prompt, I think anyone can benefit from this particular part, which is just getting rid of obvious junk data.
And yeah, what we're left with is just still a massive piece of data.
So the next round is where it gets a little bit more interesting.
And this was like where I had the biggest problem a couple years back, which is okay.
We have 20000 potential port-a-potty businesses.
I've kind of exhausted all of my ways to kind of superficially clean the data.
And so, at this point, I need a way to automate the process of manually going to every single website and verifying whether or not these are luxury restroom trailers.
And so the way that I did that is, I installed Crawl for AI.
This is an open source, LLM-friendly web crawler and scraper totally free, which is insane.
And this is something that you just install locally to your computer.
I'm brand new to AI coding.
I'm only six months in.
And so, if you're just getting started, the way that I literally did, it is just took this link, gave it to Cloud Code and told it to help me install it.
And it took about 15 minutes.
Now that we have this installed, Crawl for AI is kind of the engine that allows us to, at scale, look at every single website.
And then Cloud Code is the brain.
So we can prompt Cloud Code and say look at every single one of these 20000 websites and just go and identify the luxury restroom trailers.
So as a quick little demo here, oops, I'll just pull up my cloud code here.
And I just wanted to show people the workflow instead of just talking about it.
But I'll just do it on a smaller sort of sample size.
So here's the CSV of just 10 restroom trailers or sorry.
Here's an example of 10 porta potty companies.
And basically, I'm trying to figure out. which ones are restroom trailers and which ones aren't.
So I'm going to go ahead and just run that prompt that I showed you here and I'll just copy and paste it here.
And you're not very technical from what I remember.
I'm not.
I'm not like.
That's the funny part is, like when I learned cloud code, it was like, even to this day, I don't really think I use cloud code um to what it could be, but yeah, like I've still been able to accomplish like a ton and um yeah, I probably should explore other, other tools, but I just try to keep it simple and do it well.
Um, with tools like this.
So yeah, I'm totally not technical, which hopefully gives any reason to anyone watching this who's less technical to learn Cloud Code.
Because if I can do it, I can, you definitely can do it.
So I use cash results, so this came back super fast, but basically I gave it 10 businesses.
Here we can see it identified three luxury candidates and seven standard porta potties, but it might take longer if you run it for the first time.
And essentially I just kind of told it to go through this, go through every single website and identify, like restroom trailer, related keywords.
So it's kind of helpful to know like all the synonyms, of the keyword you're trying to look for.
And a couple pro tips.
If you are using Crawl for AI, there's extra modules that you can add, including this one.
And this is one of a few that I used, but async web crawler allows you to just crawl multiple websites concurrently.
That saves a ton of time.
But yeah, this was kind of the point where I was like, oh snap, this is insane and I can't believe it's free, because I set this up in probably 15, 20 minutes.
I wrote this prompt by just talking to ChatGPT and then it just ran in the background for three hours.
And this is really what would have taken me like a thousand hours just a couple years back.
So the result was 20,000 websites down to 725 luxury restroom trailers.
We can see the CSV here and yeah, it even gives us like verification confidence.
It's just nice.
It's nice with it.
Like I saw this and I was like, this is so cool.
But that's not it.
And that's not really enough to build a directory.
So we move on to step four.
And this is when we get into trailer inventory.
For me, that's trailer inventory.
But for you, it's just like for you, it's the first round of data enrichment.
Like I need to figure out out of all of these 725 restroom trailers.
What do they offer?
If you look online, most people are looking for two-stall and three-stall trailers, because those are good enough to cater to a 50- to 100-person wedding.
But some people are looking for more.
And so I wrote this prompt.
Again, it's very casual.
You can tell that I just had a conversation with ChatGPT.
And I just used Crawl for AI in the same way, but this time, instead of looking for keywords like restroom trailer, I told it to look for the full fleet of products that a business offers.
I believe I have a prompt as well.
We can actually just take this right over here just to show people.
I won't do this for every single one, but just to show people the workflow.
I can say, let's take those three candidates for luxury restroom trailers and use this prompt.
I'll just do that.
And this prompt again is just telling it to go and find all the different types of luxury restroom trailers that a business offers.
And I do like to add to just like get Cloud Code's opinion.
Give me your game plan.
Tell me if I'm missing anything and just let me know before we go for it.
Before we burn tokens.
Before we burn tokens and we have to upgrade our flawed.
Yeah, so this is basically.
Yeah, so cool.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it basically came back with.
A1 containers, there's a two stall trailer and a four stall trailer.
Again, this is going to take more time, but you can set up whatever logic you want.
And actually, there's a lot of nuance with this process.
So just to kind of go over that, like there's a ton of edge cases that you want to check after every single pass.
And one of the first mistakes that I did when I started enriching my data with Crawford AI was I would just give it this massive laundry list of things to get and just gave it like a massive CSV.
And I was like get the trailer inventory, get the images, get any amenities features pricing, all of that stuff.
And it just didn't work.
Like it was super low quality.
So that's why I'm kind of going slowly one at a time.
And this is also helpful because after this pass, I could examine the results.
You always find edge cases, these one-off situations where you should let Cloud Code know that it messed up.
It done messed up so that it can fix it.
And you might have to rerun this.
I reran this, I think, two or three times until... pretty much all of my data was good.
And I had all of the stall information for every single listing.
So yeah, this process just continues one by one.
For me, the next one was trailer images.
And this one was cool because not only did I use Crawl for AI to scrape the images from the business websites which, by the way, I know is a great area but I plan to go and reach out to these businesses and ask questions for permission and just have them claim the listing, which basically gives us the green light to use this.
But you can scrape the images.
And what I did was I just told Cloud Code to look for any alt text file names, examine the page that it's on and scrape the highest quality images.
And then what I did is I told it to create, I told it to take the top three candidates for trailer images.
And then I just sent it over to Claude vision.
And this way it was able to look at these images and, and identify the best ones.
Because the first time I did this I got logos and crappy images and favicons and it was like, am I really about to clean this image data?
This sounds so bad.
And this is the workaround that I came up with.
This cost about $30.
All I had to do was go to Cloud and connect my API key.
Super simple.
And this is the prompt that I used.
I let this run overnight.
But yeah, this took probably about an hour or so for 700 listings.
So if we take a look, this is kind of where we're getting brick by brick.
We're just starting to get all of this good information.
Stalls and all the green columns here are kind of the ones that are valuable.
Let me see if...
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So all of the green highlighted columns are of the images.
And I think it did a really great job.
So if we just click on any one of these, they're pretty solid.
And this was not the case the first time.
So we're starting to see how this comes together.
Just on the scraping image piece.
You know, I'm not a lawyer.
I don't play to be one on the Internet.
Frey, not to my knowledge, is a lawyer.
Is that correct?
I'm not.
He is not.
So I think you know, but I but I think that you, if you scrape people's images, you are the only way you're.
Well, let me take a step back.
You're supposed to have the rights for images that you post on your Web sites.
Right.
Sometimes those rights are available.
If you look at the terms of services of some websites, those are available.
These are small local businesses.
They might not even have a terms of service.
Just so you know, there is some risk associated with scraping images without the rights.
Totally.
Yeah.
And I think you don't even need images for a directory to rank and get traffic.
I just kind of wanted to show this use case.
And I'm sure there's ways and there's different niches where you can scrape images where it's less risky you know public images and such.
Or you can just use like stock images.
I mean, we saw from my crappy little directory, no pun intended, like this got leads without needing a ton of images on the listings so um 100 not advocating for this and definitely some risk so just know that going in and i think that was a good shout out before we get to the next step i just want to make a quick note about your quote-unquote crappy other website yeah i will say the logo on this website does slap you've got this mascot and he feels very approachable and interesting.
So I am feeling I don't know if the audience feels the same way I am feeling a bit of a loss of a little character in the new fancy Apple-style website.
100%.
I worked hard on this little guy and yeah, I just generated it with ChatGPT and I'm sure you can use NanoBanana for this.
But
Yeah, I'm actually planning on bringing this guy over and adding some human touch to this directory, because it's definitely unfinished.
It's probably like 60% finished, but I appreciate that.
That's a compliment to my creative side, which does exist in the world of directories, but it's just maybe less common.
But yeah, like...
Just kind of going back to this, though, like the process just kind of continues stacking.
I did this with the amenities and features.
Again, like the process wasn't smooth the first time, it would miss some amenities and features here and there.
But this is the very casual prompt that I wrote.
Basically just, you know, mentioned that the first time I ran this, it didn't do a good job.
There was a bunch of weird words like it and and and the like, that's not a feature.
That's definitely not a feature.
But this pass worked really well.
Once I started to kind of understand the edge cases and say I want you to go and identify all of the best pages.
Go on the homepage, look for any page with restroom trailers and go deep and was able to create these cool amenities.
This is what it came up with tons of different features that would ultimately become the filter on my directory.
If we check out that page that we're checking out here, I give people the option to choose by stall.
This is the stall data, but if we also go back and click on running water, for example, it'll just show all of the luxury restroom trailers with that specific amenity and people can click multiple if they want and then sort from there.
So that was kind of the reason I chose this one.
See if there's any sort of mentions here.
Yeah.
This one was pretty straightforward and this didn't really take too much time, but again, massive time saved compared to manually doing this.
And then the last one was also pretty simple.
It was just the service areas.
A lot of people want to know if a place can drive out like a hundred miles to a remote location where they're having a outdoor wedding.
So yeah, this is the prompt that I wrote and just asked it to go and find the service areas.
The only challenge with this is that some businesses were like in different states.
So if a business was based in Florida, sometimes the first run would show me like Florida Texas, Arizona.
And so I had to make some adjustments, but this is These are the new columns that it created.
I broke it down by city, region and radius.
So also just good to know for anyone who's shopping around for a luxury restroom trailer.
And so that's pretty much the full seven step process.
And I think it might be eight steps or four steps, depending on the type of niche that you're building a directory in or how deep you wanna go with the data enrichment.
But I think if you can just use Crawl for AI and Cloud Code, it'll serve you well.
And, more importantly, it kind of just opened my mind up to the types of directories that I can build.
For a long time I had some ideas where I could go and create very, very niche directories in competitive spaces.
And we saw a place for mom.com killing it.
But...
Unless you're like an expert SEO, have unlimited budget for backlinks and have a lot of time to wait, you're not going to rank for senior living homes.
But you might rank for senior living homes for people with dementia which, if we look on Ahrefs, actually gets like over a thousand monthly searches.
So it's a high ticket niche.
You're kind of taking your little pocket of the industry and doing that really well and And I think this kind of idea works well because for the people looking for this, like if they don't assist with dementia, that's a deal breaker.
So what are like the deal breaker features that people make decisions off of?
And how can we create like very specific directories around that?
Bathroom contractor, same thing, super competitive.
We got Angie's List and Home Guide and all of these other directories.
But what about like an ADA accessible bathroom contractor?
Like way more specific.
And now that we have the ability to go and clean and enrich data by looking at the website, content like this is all possible now.
I'm also a massive nerd of public databases.
Datagov has an unreal amount of just public data.
That's super horrible to use the UI and experience is rough.
This guy named Andy in our community built a tap water quality directory no backlinks.
Started it back in I wanna say November and he's getting over 40000 monthly visitors.
Got accepted into Mediavine selling like water filters through Amazon affiliate.
And yeah, it's super boring, but like air quality directories, like there's a bunch of like mundane but important directory ideas that I think this unlocks.
And yeah, event directories, I think event directories suck.
They still suck.
I don't know if this is like too much information, but i went to like a singles event like four months ago and i went there and i started talking to the people.
I talked to some guys and i was like, how did you learn about this event?
And they're like oh, we went through eventbrite and just scrolled and found this event.
I'm like that's crazy that you do that, like i just i, that couldn't be me, because i feel like these event directories are horrible.
But now you can essentially set up scrapers that scrape from multiple sources and you just curate a better version and with the cloud code, you can make anything that you want.
So i think there's an opportunity in event directories as well.
But um Yeah,
Just to show people the full process.
I mean, once you get the data, you have the heart of your directory.
At this point, you know, I created a cleaned up version.
There's tons of data that you're going to get.
So I stripped away all the columns of data and then I just gave it to cloud code and said Hey, use this to create the super based database.
Use the exact columns.
And then The fun part started where, once you have the database, you can just go buck wild and create whatever you want and design it however you like.
So that is the full process.
That's the most up-to-date way that I've been kind of scraping, cleaning, and enriching my data.
And yeah, it's the most important part.
It's just kind of the most boring part as well.
If you've made it to the end, you're probably bought into this idea around a directory could be a really good entry point into building something that doesn't require a lot of my time.
It could be high value if it's a really good niche.
Then I could build a micro SaaS to go and really amp up monetization and enterprise value.
But I suspect there are some people who are not bought in.
So, for the people that are naysayers about directories and creating a directory right now, specifically in this moment in time in 2026, what do you have to say to them?
Yeah, that's a good point.
And I would actually say, if your timeline is to make money in less than six months, I would not build a directory.
And I'm just saying that because I've been building them for a few years and I just wanna save people the time.
With that said, I don't know if there's, I'm obviously biased, but I don't know if there's a better playground in structured kind of approach to a project where you can learn how Cloud Code works and learn SEO and learn how to sell and get into the business of lead generation, which will always be around, than directories.
And the first directory that I built with Cloud Code was just a playground for me to learn.
And because it's so simple, like you're able to use this as a vehicle to learn that high leverage skill, which I think is AI, coding and SEO.
So, at the end of the day, the way that I think about directories is that it is still, to this day, a playground for me to learn how to get people's eyes on my projects.
And I've built other businesses and I've spent a lot of money on Facebook ads in my first business.
I would argue the top three ways to get distribution nowadays are ads, organic social and SEO.
Like those are the big three.
So choose your distribution.
I made the mistake of not focusing on distribution first, and directories are a distribution first model.
They kind of have an unfair advantage when it comes to SEO, because if I create this directory or when I publish this directory, I kind of have this topical relevance where I have like a thousand pages all around luxury restroom trailers.
So it's really easy to start ranking for luxury restroom trailer Bakersfield, California and then work my way up to like luxury restroom trailers Los Angeles.
So I think it just gives it kind of just gives you this really full process of like, how to take an idea, build an online asset that you can sell.
If it is monetizing, they can monetize in multiple ways, generally pretty high margin.
You know, you can do it from anywhere in the world and it's pretty low cost.
Now you can build a directory for under a few hundred bucks.
So in a way, these are small bets, but they can be massive businesses, as we saw in the very beginning.
Um, But again, just to save people time.
SEO generally takes time, especially if you're just getting started.
So if your timeline is under six months, if you got fired from your job or you need money immediately, I would say, go to garage sales and flip items or something like that.
Because that's what I did when I really needed money.
And yeah, that's what I would say.
100%.
I think in general, no matter what startup idea you're working on, you can't expect it to be overnight.
In general,
No matter what business model marketplace, social network, mobile app directory, micro SaaS this is a thing that you have to iterate towards and find the channels and scale it and stuff like that.
Some things are out of your control too.
One thing I wanted to ask before we head out was in a world where LLMs you mentioned SEO is a huge traffic driver for some of these directories.
In a world where people are finding products and services through LLMs like Perplexity and ChatGBT and Gemini, What is the role of directories there?
Right,
Because is ChatGPT just going to scrape luxuryrestroomtrailers.com and just put it in there?
And then how are you going to be able to generate revenue?
Yeah, totally fair question.
I would say I have two points on this.
And the first one is that I think if someone's browsing a directory in 2026, they're sort of past the discovery phase.
Like what I think ChatGPT, Perplexity and all these other LLMs do really well, is they help you discover things or get more information on the thing?
But by the time someone's on a directory, I think they're in the decision-making phase.
And with any more complex decision where the consequence is too much to risk if you mess it up, they're going to do their due diligence and look at all the options.
And so this can play out in a couple of different ways, like senior living homes.
Like, if you're finding a senior living home for your parents, are you just going to go on ChatGPT and just like, Choose the first one?
No.
You're probably going to take your parents' preferences in mind and they might have deal breakers like the dementia example.
Lawyer, anything in health, finance or legal.
The consequence and the risk of choosing a bad accountant or financial advisor is just not worth it.
You're not going to just choose the first option.
And so you're going to compare all the options near you.
And I think that's what pushes people to Google and really go out of their way to look for what could be your directory.
Pricing is another thing.
Anytime someone can save money.
I think that drives a lot of just going on Google and looking at directories.
And yeah, like...
That's 100% a thing.
I was listening to the podcast, a podcast around.
Like you know, these millionaires driving across town for cheaper blueberries at the grocery store.
Like this is always going to be a problem.
And then the second point is like local SEO, or any version of local SEO, hasn't really changed that much.
And what I mean is LLMs are decent, but if we go to like haircut SEO, Los Angeles, for example.
This is now kind of looking at things from an SEO perspective and why directories might continue working for a long time.
This is a local query and there's not really much different.
Like you kind of have your local pack here, some sponsored posts, but then you have your organic listing results.
But if you say like I don't know, hair gel or something like that, Google's completely changed the way the SERPs looks over the years.
And this is the reason why, when I build directories, I don't choose product-based niches, because it's way harder.
You're just competing with so much other content and like socials and all this other stuff.
So from an SEO perspective, I think like any kind of local SEO is still pretty low hanging fruit.
And I still think directories are just going to be around in some capacity and maybe we'll see a different direction.
I don't know if you saw Mark Liu's Trust MRR, but it's essentially a directory and he leveraged his personal brand and audience to create it.
But that's been going crazy.
He turned it into a marketplace where now you can acquire or sell businesses, kind of playing on this idea that you can monetize.
Once you have traffic, you can monetize in any way that they want.
And people will go out of their way and just email you sometimes and say hey, can you add this to your directory?
And that might inspire a kind of monetization idea.
So that's what I would say.
But it's definitely a real concern.
I'm sure it's going to get way better.
And we might get to a point with agentic search where it's just unreal.
And Yeah, we'll have to figure it out at that point.
But I don't think lead generation as a business is ever going to go away.
Yeah, you could make the argument that in a world where people are going to LLMs for search or AI, search takes over that, in fact, the niche directories are the ones that stay and the ones that are horizontal directories actually stay, get hurt because the prompting is very, very specific.
And what's going to happen is the data.
ChatGPT is going to have to reference your website, no matter what.
They can't just fully steal all your data, so they're going to give you the link.
And the beauty is, instead of getting a thousand little blue links on Google in an AI search world, you're getting three.
You ask for a question, where can I find the best luxury restroom trailer in my area?
You're getting one or two or three responses.
I think that if I'm building a directory...
This year, I'm trying to build it super niche so I can play into that new AI search era.
100%.
Can't be ignored.
That is for a fact.
Frey Chu, thank you for... You're an angel.
Thank you for coming on and being so well prepared and sharing as much sauce as you do.
You're basically a spaghetti factory for directories and God bless you for it.
We appreciate you.
Frey, if people want to learn more about you and your ecosystem, what's the best place for that?
Yeah, man.
Always appreciate you having me on.
Seriously appreciate it.
If you want to learn more about directories, I do make a video every week. on my own channel.
And I also created a free directory community.
There's over 3,200 people in it.
So a bunch of smart people in there.
If you have questions and you're just getting started, or you want to learn some tips, get some feedback, that is always an option.
Otherwise, that's pretty much it.
And yeah, happy to share what I'm up to.
Appreciate you.
I'll include links for that in the description and in the show notes.
If you like this content and you want more of it, feel free to like, comment, subscribe.
I'll see you hopefully... What year did you come on, Frey?
Did you come on last year or the year before?
It was literally a year ago.
Almost on the dot, actually.
So I'd love this to be a yearly tradition.
That sounds good.
And see how the world of directories is evolving.
I know people love you and love you coming on.
I think it's just because you're really clear on explaining things.
Yeah.
You've amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge in this space.
So thank you again and I'll see you next time.
Appreciate it.
Super kind and I'll catch you later.
