The Most Overlooked One-Man Business: $20 to Start Transcript

00:00 That specific website I've made around like 150k  from. As far as the time commitment, 30 minutes every 4 months. Sometimes I didn't touch it for  6 months. I still don't touch it really at all. And I was like, okay, well, I I don't know how to  code, so I'm just going to do a website. I watched a bunch of YouTube and I just started building. A  Claude Code subscription is all you really need.

00:22 The highest offer that I've gotten for the first  directory was around 50k. It had lorem ipsum on the front page, yet I got a $20,000 lead, already  getting 42,000 monthly organic visitors. It got to 10k a month in 6 months, which is really  fast. Holy cow. Meet Frey. A few years ago, he shut down a shoe business that he'd ran for 5  years, and he was pretty bummed out about it.

00:42 So, he watched YouTube, learned how people find  websites on Google, and built one simple website. It's just a list of thrift stores. The first  month he put ads on it, it made 1,200 bucks, and at its best, it was making $3,000 a month. He  touches it maybe 30 minutes every few months. He says one $50 link from another website is a big  reason that one site has made around $150,000.

01:11 These are called directories. Your startup cost is  basically one AI tool subscription, and by the end of this episode, you'll know exactly how to find  the idea, how to build it with AI, and how to get it found on Google. In a few minutes, we'll talk  about the website with fake placeholder text on the home page that still landed a $20,000 order.  Later on, we'll talk about the exact five-sentence email that he sends to get other sites to link to  his for only 50 bucks.

01:34 And at the end, we're going to talk about a three-month-old website a list  of links to government websites that gets 42,000 visitors a month. Please enjoy. What is your  best like backlink return on investment? Like, how much did you spend for a backlink that you  can attribute x amount of revenue to? It was the first directory that I ever built. I built  the directory a month later, found an existing directory doing well, reached out to their like  best link.

02:03 Within a day, still remember the guy, his name is Brian. He was like, "Yeah, just PayPal  me 50 bucks. You got it." And it was a link swap, so it wasn't a link insert. If there is an exact  sort of like competitor that matches my directory, I would actually ask them to swap the link because  you effectively remove a link from your competitor and gain a very solid link for yourself.

02:25 And  that's what happened. And that single link basically got me onto the first page for a lot of  different keywords. Woah. That specific website I've made like around like 150k from just in the  last 4 years. So, I would say that's probably the most profitable backlink that I It was $50 back I  mean, there's probably a lot of other reasons, but that That was the only link that I built for maybe  even ever.

02:49 Cuz what people don't tell you about link building is once you get to the first rank  on the first page, you naturally accrue backlinks because people are writing blogs or journalists  are writing about it. So, it's really just how do you get there? And then like I don't want to say  you can coast, it depends on what your niche is, but that's what happened.

03:10 I just started getting  a lot of organic links because I was ranking position one on the first page. Okay. Is it safe  to say that by the end of this episode people will have enough knowledge to launch a directory that  can still exist in the age of AI and copycats? I think so. Okay. Well, why don't we start by  you telling us simply what a directory is?

03:32 I've always said that a directory is just a list.  I think it's really just as simple as that, but a directory in its traditional form, I think we're  used to yellow pages, we're used to TripAdvisor, Yelp. A directory just guides someone through a  decision-making process in my opinion. And so, a lot of people on directories are either in the  discovery phase or they're in the decision-making phase and you're either You're pretty much most of  the time helping them make the decision.

03:52 And so, the idea is you build this website and you save  them the time that they would spend manually looking up a bunch of things with 20 tabs  open. You can put a lead form, people submit their information, and that all of a sudden  becomes what is effectively like a five, 10, 15,000 dollar lead. What would you say to people  that are like, "Uh directories aren't relevant in the age of AI.

04:18 Like AI's just going to get  us what we need without us needing to go to a website or directory." Yeah, I would say that  there's always a version of your story that's true. If you try to create a yellow pages, that's  probably not going to work. The age of creating a directory where you're in 50 different categories  what I'm talking about is, like, let's say you start "Things to do Denver," and you're talking  about museums, daycares, dog groomers, all of these categories you're not going to perform very  well, in my

04:43 opinion. There are examples of that still working, but it's a very, very small number  of websites that have built authority for years. What's much more effective is focusing in on one  specific thing and solving one person's problem. Directories do work. If you look at the data and  you look at how quickly these websites are able to get indexed and get traffic, it's kind of  crazy.

05:07 And I have a few examples if you want me to share them, but I just kind of focus on the  numbers and I build them to see for myself because I don't want to rely on what I see even in the  data. And directories are still one of the best vehicles for just getting really early organic  traffic. I launched a directory last week as well, and there's just like certain niches where AI  overviews are just like...I'm just getting so much traffic from AI overviews from a fresh  website versus other niches where it's like, this

05:39 one's like 25%of my traffic's coming straight  from ChatGPT, and I can see in my analytics. And it's a a week and two days old, so yeah, nine days  old. Wow. What got you thinking about directories in the first place? At the time I closed my first  business, I ran for five years, it was a shoe business, and I remember being really depressed  and telling myself that in my next business, I need five different things.

05:59 I needed the  business to be scalable because shipping shoes to Canada was very expensive. I wanted something  fully remote. I wanted something where I could sell the business as an asset. I wanted something  that was high-margin. And I think something that I didn't need to rely like on personnel. Like I  could kind of do it myself. And the two options that I landed on were really SaaS or website.

06:25 And  at the time, a lot of people were owning these niche blogs. And I was like, "Okay, well, I I  don't know how to code, so I'm just going to do a website." And I didn't even mean to build  a directory. I watched a bunch of YouTube, spent like 100, 200 hours just learning what SEO  was. And I just started building. And that first directory ended up getting at the peak around  90,000 organic monthly visitors.

06:46 Within six months, it was getting around 30,000 organic  monthly visitors. And I just started job. And I was like, "Oh, let me put up some ads." And I  remember the first month I made like 1,200 bucks just from the ads. And I was like, Wow. The heck  is this? What niche was this directory in? This was a This was a thrifting directory. Okay. in the  thrifting space.

07:05 Okay. So, you just saw a bunch of signals out there using some tools that showed  you there was a lot of search traffic for people trying to find thrift stores. And then, of course,  these thrift stores are listed on Google Maps, but aside from that, there wasn't like a central  website or a place where people could get answers to those questions. Actually, there was.

07:27 And so,  that's actually part of my vetting process. One of the first things that I do to find opportunities  is I'll literally look up the keyword and directory into Google. And what I did find was  a small website that was getting 120,000 organic monthly visitors. The information was wrong. It  looked bad. It was just a bad resource. And I was like, "I could create something much better than  this."

07:50 And this is proof, at least from my limited SEO knowledge at the time, looking at signals  like domain rating and identifying that this was not that authoritative of a website from an SEO  perspective. And I could just compete in in So, that was my proof of concept that it was showing  up on the first page of Google, it's getting traffic, and it wasn't authoritative.

08:10 And then I  did actually check Google Maps to see if it was easy to find, and it was not easy to find. This  particular thrift store is a type of thrift store that it's kind of borderline adjacent to almost  like liquidation stores. And Okay. So, it was not easily sorted through. You would see liquidation  stores and other types of random things pop up in Google Maps, and I was like, "Okay, this is an  inconvenience for the user."

08:33 And that's what gave me the green light to build. And the fact that  my whole website should probably target a single keyword. Cuz I don't want to dilute what message  I'm giving to Google and say, "Oh, I'm in like 50 different categories." No, I'm just really talking  about one thing that gets like 100,000 monthly searches. And so, that's really all I knew.

08:52 Okay,  so you're saying like that's not too niche for a directory. Keyword city, that's worth it to build  a directory for. Depending on the industry, right? Like it can't be like, you know, rhinoplasty Omaha  suburbs. But if it were If it were auto repair shops, Chicago, that's plenty big enough. As long  as you can reasonably get to tens of thousands of monthly organic visitors, which is um very,  very possible.

09:17 Okay. And at its peak, how much was this website making per month, and how long  were you spending on it every month? At the peak, it was around like $3,000. It would hover cuz  display ads are very unpredictable. I would say like 2,300 to $3,000 because around 1,500 to 2,000  was coming in from display ads, and then I do sell a $19 digital product.

09:41 That's basically telling  people when new product arrives. To get that, I had to call like 100 different stores, uh which is  very unscalable, but proprietary data in a sense, right? You can't find that information online. And  uh that would bring in uh the difference like I would have like $1,000 sold for digital products.  And so, yeah. And as far as the time commitment, 30 minutes every 4 months.

10:05 Sometimes I I touch it  for 6 months. Wow. I still don't touch it really at all for it. Like every 6 months I'll spend  30 minutes just like refreshing content and uh maybe building a link or two, but not a lot  of time. And how much of your traffic or interest on this website is coming from like AI tools like  ChatGPT today versus when you first started it?

10:23 I wasn't tracking it when I first started, but these  days I would say not a lot for this particular niche. I would say somewhere around like five  not even 10%. Yeah, probably 5%and it's mainly ChatGPT. Strangely enough, actually DuckDuckGo  and Bing Hm. and Yahoo give me more traffic than AI citations for this particular niche, but it's  different for other ones, yeah.

10:50 Hey, if you're liking this episode, we spent a lot of time on it.  Please just hit subscribe and it would mean the world. There's probably 10 different ways that you  can monetize a directory. So, most people do think of lead generation, feature listings, selling per  lead, selling that kind of stuff. I think ads, display ads. We've all gone on websites where  there's just a bunch of ads.

11:11 That's the other common way. But there's digital products. There  are Hm. like education, like uh subscription-based education. Now with the Vibe Coding, like  I truly believe there's just so much more opportunity. Like I just built a job board 2 days  ago where it's not an ordinary job board. There's a CRM attached to it and there's just so many  ways to make money by packaging it and offering more value and straying away from Yeah.

11:38 your two  typical options, ads and leads. You could sell a $19 PDF on how to find the best senior living  center for your parent. What else is open? Yeah, I mean, for the senior living, actually people  are doing um violations, like code violations. So, there's a public database where companies are  legally required to share if there's been any kind of like official reports.

12:01 And so, you can  literally scrape that public data and package it. But going into the like some of the more creative  ways to monetize, I've seen like some directories as of late, which is like it effectively helps you  reach out to journalists or like angel investors and they just vibe coded a CRM. $50 a month is  kind of like their offer. Gives you access to essentially what is a bunch of scraped emails  probably ran through something like million verify or some email verification system and a CRM  to help them track

12:30 who they're reaching out to, when to follow up, notifications, that kind of  stuff. Okay. So that's like I think a pretty good kind of like a also very versatile way  to monetize. I'm intrigued by this story that you said you have. What story do you have for  me? A woman came up to me and was like, "Hey, can I get your feedback on this website  that I'm creating?"

12:49 I was like, "Yeah, sure. Take a look." And I saw rhinoplasty near  me. I'm like, "Oh, you're building a directory. So what inspired you to create this?" And she  said, "I spent $6,000 on my nose job at a very young age and they and they botched my nose. It  was like crooked. It was messed up. So I spent $40,000 on a nose repair." Ouchies. And  so instead of like yeah, she was angry but she funneled all of this like angry energy  into creating a resource that actually helped people not make the same mistake that she did.

13:17 That pushed her to create an Instagram handle, scrape public databases to get license information  for doctors and surgeons who do rhinoplasties. She was so passionate about this that clearly the  extra work, the extra distribution required to make what otherwise would be a very difficult SEO  play like rhinoplasties near me, she can make that work.

13:40 And so that was like the first thing that  was like, "Oh wait, that kind of reminds me of like first directory built." Then I met another  guy. Sorry, she she had the right why. She had a why that was greater than her competitors  why which made all the difference. 100%. Yeah, that passion was like palpable and like that  why was very strong. The second person was just opportunistic.

14:00 He He built an NSFW directory many  directories in the NSFW space. So not suitable for work, kind of inappropriate type stuff is what  you're saying? Yep. Yep. And so he he got to 10K a month in 6 months which is really fast for  like any business, but particularly directories, and he just looked at high search intent, high  volume keywords, low keyword difficulty-ish.

14:24 Like there are some definitely high difficulty  keywords there, but it was just an SEO play, and he just kind of creates these directories and  monetizes them in any other way, like just ads, featured listings. He has other directories  getting like a million monthly organic visitors. But he's like not He's like, you know, you talk  to him and you're like, "Okay, like clearly this guy the money, period.

14:44 He's in it for the money.  So those are like the two ways that I kind of see the way you can like build directories. You  can just like build portfolios of directories, and like literally just do the research and find  a lot of different opportunities. to know like what did your directories number two through five  look like, and how did those go? Yeah.

14:59 So uh two through five So up to my I think I was batting  three for three, and then my fourth directory uh didn't do too hot. I probably have around  like a 30%failure rate. Directory number two was my first lead gen directory, and sort of  proprietary data directory. I've talked about it publicly. It's called discoverplasma.com. And  uh it basically crowdsources plasma donation pay.

15:28 The third directory was another let me prove  to myself that I actually created the first directory correctly, and it wasn't an accident.  So I built I built a directory where the whole goal was to just get a lot of traffic. It was  in an adjacent niche from the first directory, which is actually a solid framework for anyone  who wants to build directories.

15:42 That's why finding something successful first is so valuable.  You can build in an adjacent niche. And so So that's what I did. Within, I want to say Yeah,  it was very fast. The third directory within like, I want to say three or four months was getting  20,000 organic monthly visitors. I slapped on ads, and it was like immediately making like three,  four hundred dollars a month.

16:03 Nothing crazy. Sometimes it would spike like crazy. I remember  my highest revenue day for that directory was three hundred like twenty-six dollars in a day  just from ads. Wow. So very very Passive. spikes. Very Yeah, very passive, very much the same like  simple directory targeting, low competition, high search volume keyword, underserved, hard  to find on Google Maps.

16:26 Only in this case there wasn't an existing successful site. I just kind  of knew that it would probably work because my first directory worked. And then after that, it  was a lot of experimentation, even to this day, a lot of experimentation. Which one was the  dud and why? So, the fourth was a dud in the sense that I just didn't put effort into it.

16:48 It  was called portapottymatch.com. I also talked about it uh publicly. I don't even know if it's  still up, but it was around porta potties and it had lorem ipsum on the front page, yet I got a  $20,000 lead. I told this story Wow. Um to to a few people. It was the New Mexico State Fair. They  reached out and they said, "Here's the lineup. I need like six luxury porta potties, a hundred like  standard porta potties."

17:10 Yeah, your website. it's no longer up. Yeah, it was uh it was supposed  to be an experiment for more traditional lead generation. And what I discovered is I really  don't want to do cold calls to local businesses after getting leads, but for a long time I was  getting leads from people who were for weddings, for festivals, for film shoots. Those were kind of  like the three main situations that people would reach out.

17:42 And those leads were pretty valuable.  And so, it was a dud because I just really didn't want to do the sales part of the lead generation  directory, which is instrumental. And um that's what I learned. And that's probably the number  one reason why lead generation tends to fail for a lot of people is they're not they're not ready  to accept the SEO side, the website building side, and the sales side.

18:07 And it's it's a lot. It's  a lot. I usually know within the first 30 days, definitely definitely within 60 to 90 days,  whether or not it's worth investing more time, but more importantly, money in backlinks. That's  literally the thing that moves the needle, that gets you from page three to page two and  eventually one. So, how did the scratch and dent appliance one go?

18:30 It is still there. It's called  scratchanddentlocator.com. There is an advertised page where I connected my analytics, so you can  see how much traffic it's getting. I think it's around like 6,000 organic monthly visitors. And  launch a website with 10,000 plus pages to see how indexing works. Oh. So, Yeah. Yeah, there's  like a theme with at least the way that I build, I try to experiment with a specific SEO related  thing because I believe the better you get at SEO, that's like the monetizable trade.

19:01 It's  really not the directories. It's learning SEO And you're saying in an age of AI, SEO is as  relevant as ever, if not more so. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I would definitely say so. As long as humans  or robots are using the internet for anything, SEO is alive and well, right? Yeah. Even AI agents  trying to find answers need good SEO to find those answers.

19:23 What tool did you use to vibe code the  scratch and dent website? I use CloudCode and I haven't changed since. I'm the kind of person  who just sticks to one thing if it works really well. I'm not really changing too much. So, today  I still use CloudCode to build all my directories. Okay. A marketing agency added $133,752 per year  in new recurring revenue in their first 30 days with zero new hires.

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20:30 A co-pilot helps you work,  but an AI employee works when you do not. How many directories in total do you have today? Oh  man, I honestly don't even know. I think I want to say like maybe in the ballpark of like inching  towards 15 or so. Like a month ago, I used Grogbot to build laredocranerental.com, a directory of not  even a directory, but like a lead gen service for people needing crane rentals in Laredo, Texas.

20:59 And  I got like a $5,000 and a $23,000 lead in my first 2 weeks. And more leads since, and I have not done  anything with it. I'm just I just do it for the love of the game, you know, which is foolish, but  there's a lot of opportunity like out there. Like I do it myself for fun. Like especially with these  AI tools, you can do it more easily than ever before.

21:25 100%100% Are you using AI agents at all  to go do research and scrape and build for you, or are you mostly just like prompting yourself with  Claude code? I do do a lot of AI agent research, mainly for ideation. I would say that the idea  is the most time-consuming part of building a directory. Scraping data, also agents. I think  that's um definitely a part.

21:45 Other than that, it's yeah, me prompting Claude code to kind of  just brain dump my idea, my vision, and have it build it for me. It's yeah. And I I I guess I  could go in more depth, but I don't think anyone who has played with Claude code has an issue  building out these directories. Yeah, it's it's relatively easy. Just in plain English, you just  kind of prompt it.

22:12 Any five coding tool out there could handle what you need to do. Yeah, yeah.  Lovable, for sure. I even found that a Squarespace directory yesterday. You can use whatever works  for you. What other tools are you using to come up with that idea? I know you use Ahrefs. Is there  anything else out there? I keep it pretty simple. I mean, for finding ideas, it really helps to use  the Ahrefs MCP or API connected to your cloud code and start to feed it prompts that represent how  I look for good directory ideas.

22:41 For example, finding a successful directory by typing  in your keyword plus directory in Google, looking at the top 10 in the SERPs, and seeing if  any of them get traffic and are low domain rating, kind of prove that this is low competition and  viable. And then you can add extra prompts like, is this something that has a search intent that  would lead to return visits?

23:04 Is it something that could lead to just like a not a one-click  and then leave sort of thing? Like, if you created a directory around like claw machines,  for example, that's like quick information, I'm leaving. Never going to probably come back to  that. And so, there's a lot of other things you can kind of pile onto these prompts that make it  easier for ideation, which is what I do a lot of the time.

23:33 And that's really it. I don't spend time  exploring other tools, really. I would say Reddit, if anything, but feel like that's a that's  a known solid resource. What is like the the secret to getting good backlinks? Cuz from what  I understand, backlinks is the secret, largely the secret to having like an okay directory  to get some traffic versus a lot of traffic that really makes money.

23:54 My favorite way is the  same way link building agencies build backlinks, which is really just cold email. And so, the idea  is once you find an existing successful directory, most of the time they'll have backlinks. Look at  their backlinks in a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, and you can simply reach out to the very website  owners who are pointing a link to your competition and say,"Hey, can I pay you X amount of money  to have this link inserted into your blog, your listical, your resource page?"I've been doing this  a

24:24 lot this year. Um I'm getting like a 7%response rate because that's the next question people will  have is how many people actually respond to this very specific request? Do people even know what  that link insert means? Sure. And surprisingly a lot of people do. There's a lot of things that you  can do to negotiate, but it is really as simple as that.

24:48 It's very boring. You do need to know email  infrastructure. You need to buy a domain and not ruin your own business emails domain reputation,  email domain reputation. So, there are some things that you want to learn and and brush up on, but  it's really like a less than a week learning phase and more of a let me warm up these emails for 2  weeks and then start sending out these emails in a targeted way.

25:12 And there's a lot of nuance when  it comes to that, but that's the general idea. You just reach out to site owners directly. Now, are  you asking specifically for your link to be on the exact same page on their website or any page on  their website? So, what I do is I'll go back to Ahrefs and I'll look at which websites have real  traffic coming to the blog, reading the blog, because the ideal situation is that someone  reads the blog and clicks on the link and then ends up on my directory or my website.

25:41 I think  those user signals are quite valuable. And so, I do kind of like do some extra research once  they agree and say,"Hey, can I actually have it on this page?"And then I will pretty much  give them a single sentence that says,"Hey, just like literally copy and paste this."And  it'll point to you one of my location pages, sometimes my homepage, kind of just make it easy  for them.

26:02 Okay. So, you say 7%response rate. Is that 7%like close rate? Like 7%of people will put  it on their website or they just respond to you at all? 7%respond and a very high percentage of those  people who respond agree to put the link on. And that doesn't necessarily mean I take them up on  it because as you do this, you'll discover that no one knows what the fair market value of a backlink  is.

26:25 You'll have very low authority websites asking for $300 for a link. And I'm like, maybe when like  a lot of these people are blogs that used to get a lot of traffic, but that have really died and get  like zero traffic now for the last few years. And they're like, I want $500 for a backlink. And I'm  like, I That's crazy. And then on the other hand, I've gotten DR60 websites, which for people who  are with SEO rating.

26:49 out of 100? And 60's high. It's out of 100, but that's high. I mean, a lot of  other websites have five, 10. It's very high. It's very authoritative. For those who aren't in the  link building game, that is like a $500 backlink all day. If you hire an actual link building  agency, DR60 with real traffic coming. And I've gotten those for 50 bucks. I've gotten those for  75 bucks like multiple times.

27:13 I've even got them for free because I'll reach out to nonprofits  sometimes, and they'll just be like, yeah, we'll just list you. You look like a helpful resource.  I'll just list you on the website. And so, you do have to make sure you have an actually valuable  resource before you do this cuz that does increase the rate at which people agree to put a link on  your on their site.

27:34 Now, are you able to read like the exact email that you sent to these people, the  first email? Yeah. I have a templated approach. Let me just pull it up here. I might make parts of  this email slightly vague just to protect some of my niche sites, but um So, basically the format is  the first sentence is it's a quick intro. And I'll say I'll say,"Hi there."or"Hi Steve.

28:01 My name is  Frey, and I had an oddly specific question about your post and then"the post in quotes,"and I  link to it." Insert like the name of the web page in question? Yeah, like Okay."How to five  best drifting spots in Denver"or something like that. Okay, so if you have their first name Sorry,  if you have their first name, then it's"Hey first name."If you don't, then it's"Hey there."

28:25 And  I love the hook. That first question,"I have an oddly specific question."Like that's got my  attention. Very brilliant. Yes, and then the second sentence is personalization. So, I have  scrapers that take the first half of a blog, and it writes a very brief, concise second sentence  that just shows that I kind of read the article. So, I'll say like, "You've got this thrift store  on your list, and I really like this one."I try to not make it sound like AI, but it's very brief.

28:57 The third sentence is the offer. Could I pay you $75 to have a link added in that section or in  this article? The fourth sentence is who you are, why you built it, why they should even care in  the first place. So, I built XYZ directory because it was hard to find thrift stores. They never  showed up on Google Maps, and strangely enough, I get 20,000 people a month coming to my site  now.

29:20 My fifth sentence is the founder POV, where I say,"Honestly, this is a side project  I'm trying to grow. I'm trying to get more eyes on it."Nothing ever to do. I'll just send you the  sentence. 75 bucks for your time. No worries if it's not a fit. And that's the whole email. Same  structure for every single email, and the founder POV is insanely valuable.

29:41 It works really well, I  should say. That just like it puts a human behind the email. You know? Yeah. I love it. Sell your  story. That's you doing that in one sentence. By the way, I have a free weekly newsletter with  super thorough business ideas. It's at tkopod.com, as in the Kerner Office, tkopod.com. One email  per week. Go check it out. going to ask about the money.

30:04 Like, when do you introduce how  much I can pay you, or maybe you don't? So, you don't because if they're not expecting  to pay, but but you prob-clearly tested this, and it's like, is 75 bucks the price you put  in every email, no matter what, or is that just what you happen to put in this one? No, it's  dependent on the amount of root domain traffic, so how many people are going to the website in  general, verified by Ahrefs, the domain rating, that's definitely a big one, and me and me  those two things, and then I

30:29 guess the niche itself. If you're going to try to rank for like if  you're building links to anything in healthcare, finance, legal, those are naturally just going  to be more expensive. But for like common niches like a thrift store or something like that, I'll  even start at $50. I am shameless in that sense and there's always some negotiation at least most  of the time.

30:52 And so I think like if it's a higher if it's a DR60, I might offer like 75 to 100 even.  If it's something like a DR20 or 30, I'm offering 50 bucks in a lot of these cases, which again is  way cheaper than the $300 that a link building service would charge you. Sure. But it doesn't  cost them anything. They don't lose anything by inserting your link, right?

31:21 It's a win-win. I  feel like this exactly what you're describing, which is the key to all of this, link building,  could be so easily done with an AI agent. Like connect it to your Ahrefs, your Semrush, your  data for SEO account, either by logging in in a browser or through the MCP or through the API.  And if you don't know what that means, whatever, ask ChatGPT.

31:41 And just saying here's what I'll pay  for 40 to 60 domain rating, 50 bucks. 60 to 70, 75 bucks. 70 plus, 100 bucks. I'm willing to go to  a max ceiling of X, Y, or Z if they negotiate back and forth. But try to find the owner's first name.  The email should look like this. Go. Like have you tried that? I built an entire software that  that auto buys that does this.

32:03 Could you give an example of what a good prompt looks like to build  this website? Of course there's going to be some back and forth, but like a master prompt. Even  if you could we could link one in the description uh for people. But whether we link one or not,  what does your prompt look like to build this in Replit, lovable, cloud code, whatever?

32:25 A like a backlink email there. No, sorry. I changed subject a little bit. Like the the actual  website, the directory. Oh, the directory? Yeah, so my my most recent build was a job board for  SDRs, sales development representatives in tech sales. And my first prompt was really a brain  dumped. Uh it was a brain dumped, but specifically targeting data acquisition first.

32:51 So, every  directory that I build, I focus on the data. So, I would say something like, I have a vision  for a job board. It's not a normal job board. It's specifically catered to people who want to  break into tech sales and become SDRs, BDRs, AEs, which are account executives. Basically, entry-ish  level jobs in tech sales. Mhm. I want you to scrape the data and find any like small, medium,  and large business that is currently hiring SDRs.

33:29 I want you to get all the information around what  the pay is if it if it is listed, job description, experience, all that kind of stuff. And beyond  the data, I would even want you to make it way more helpful. So, this job board is not a normal  job board because it's actually going to be based on referrals. Like, I want people to realize  that getting a job is way easier if you just have someone on the inside referring you.

33:52 So,  what you should do is really build the job board and then also scrape all the individuals who  work at said companies hiring so that you can individually message them very easily with a copy  and paste message that says, "Hey, can I can I get 2 minutes of your time? I'm trying to learn a  little bit more about what you do on a day-to-day as an SDR."And um the CRM will track it, so it'll  make it really easy to know when to follow up with people.

34:17 I'm explaining this in literally writing  You're just talking. experience. Do you use like Whisper Flow or like just voice dictation? And  you're just writing down, right? Cuz to me, that's the best prompt is me just like rambling.  I'm all over the place, and then you just upload it. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. I'm using Whisper Flow. Yeah.  Have you ever been offered any money for one of your directories, like to buy it out?

34:36 And if so,  how did that go? Yeah, yeah. I've had actually several people try to purchase my first directory  and actually that's not even true. I I had someone reach out yesterday about a random directory that  I built in the in the trash space weirdly enough and the porta potty ones. Um the highest offer  that I've gotten for the for the first directory was around like 50k and so at the time I think it  was roughly around 3x annual revenue which is not incredible if you look at SAS margins they're like  four to like

35:08 7x 10x crazy stuff like that. But it was during a time where a lot of people were  afraid of Google AI overviews cuz they just came out but I've never like seen a super significant  drop. But yeah, that was that was how it went and I think maybe like three other people offered like  40 to 45k for that. Wow. Yeah, so For the thrift store one or for the trash one?

35:30 Okay. store one,  I think for one of the porta potty ones someone offered 10k and then I was like, you don't want  this, man. I'm just trying to do you a favor. There's Laura Mibsum on the front page. Like yeah,  I'm getting leads but like like let me just be a good person and just want to scam you. Yeah, like  I'm not trying to do that to you. So uh yeah, it was a pretty No.

35:51 decently known founder as  well. Oh, that's cool. Didn't you have like a headlight bulb directory? How how did that come  to pass? So I launched that two weeks ago and so Okay. that's a very very new directory and I mean  it's slowly trickling up uh for sure. It is a very interesting experiment in the sense that there's  a lot of successful versions of this in different niches.

36:18 For example, I think findmywipers.com is  a directory where you do the same thing. You put in your year make and model and you can find  the wiper blades and it's an affiliate play. What's the startup cost for this business? I would  say a Claude code subscription is all you really need especially if you take the generous free  offers from like Vercel for example which is like think about it like the GoDaddy or hosting for 5  coders, but you there's other options out there.

36:48 And then like GitHub, which holds and that's  where your code lives, that's free. Supabase, where your database lives, has a free project.  And so if you just utilize these free versions for your first project, you really just need your  Cloud Code subscription. I also use the Astro framework. It's basically a free open source way  to create a website that's really great for like content-heavy websites.

37:10 So it there's really not  much cost until you want to actually build links. And before if you asked me this like a year ago,  I would have said,"Oh yeah, like Outscraper, that's how I'm using that's how I'm collecting my  data."That can cost in the ballpark of 50 to even $100, 150 bucks, depending on how much data you're  scraping. You can scrape your data through Cloud Code.

37:35 But I don't really spend money on anything  else besides Cloud Code and backlinks. Sometimes Supabase cuz I I have a lot of projects  there, so I'm paying $10 a month. Yeah, domain. Yep. Obviously, not much else. So tech  stack you can't live without Cloud Code, GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, Ahrefs, data for SEO, anything  else? I would say Resend. Resend is really solid for email marketing.

38:01 Yep. Um also very generous  free free plan. Mhm. And yeah, I would say that's my tech stack right now. Um and I would argue you  don't even need some of them. Yeah. Do you have a few minutes to share your screen and log in to  Ahrefs and just kind of just for a few minutes show us like, all right, here's a good idea,  here's a good idea, and here's why I think so.

38:27 Or here's what might seem like a good idea on the  surface, but is actually not and here's why. Yeah, yeah. All right, so this is entitysearch.us. It's  official business entity search. It's a directory. Very cool. literally just It's so funny because  it's just linking to the public databases. It's really not doing anything else besides this for  every single state.

38:47 It gets 42,000 organic monthly visitors at a DR 21. So, again, out of 100, this  is in the range of something that is absolutely beatable from like an SEO authority perspective.  Mhm. And they started they started in during the summer around mid-July. Wow. is maybe 3 months  old roughly. Actually, yeah, pretty pretty much on the dot. It's 3 months old already getting  42,000 monthly organic visitors.

39:15 And it's not even offering anything that unique. It's just  convenience. So, it's a very boring idea. Yeah, so this is this is a cool one. I think this  is another quite new one here. It's called geoblackout.com. Outages mapped live worldwide.  Mhm. for all of these places. outages or power outages? I think they're power out power outages.  Interesting.

39:43 And so this one's doing pretty well as well. So, it's a DR 9. I think this is possibly  the first DR 9 low authority SEO website with this much traffic. 134,000 organic visitors. it could  be doing so much better. I mean, but it possibly I think what this speaks to is that there may  be a bigger version of this website that gets millions of monthly organic visitors.

40:11 Yeah. Uh  but all the time. But yeah, it could be doing better. Uh and it's relatively low barrier to  entry. But this is yeah, around June 2025. So, maybe like a year and a couple months old, but  their growth has been really really solid. And so this is like a perfect ad play in my opinion  because there's so much traffic. And um yeah, that's another cool one.

40:35 Hey, so if you're  serious about starting a directory business, we put together a 27-page guide business plan  template, whatever you want to call it. Super thorough. It's 19 bucks. It's pinned in the top  of the description and in a pinned comment. And if you don't think it's good enough, we will give you  a full refund, no questions asked. It's really, really good.

40:54 tradeschoolsnearme.co. Find top-rated  trade schools and programs online. This could be like an interesting like potential lead generation  play. DR 1.4, guys. When you start a brand new website, you're a DR zero. When you build a  couple links, you know, this is kind of probably where you're sitting if it's a high quality,  high DR link. 49,000 organic monthly visitors.

41:19 This one's a little bit older. So, it started a  couple years ago now. But, this is a very, very nice directory cuz the keywords are much higher in  commercial intent. People looking up trade school near me, yes, they could be in discovery, but  some of them are literally money in hand, ready to pay for these plumbing schools or vocational  schools.

41:38 Yeah, you don't get more bottom of the funnel keywords than trade school in Tampa. Maybe  if it was like electrical trade school Tampa, yeah, that's slightly better, but this is this  is really solid. And so, that's a really cool one. This is a more of a Actually, really like  this one, tubstays.com. This is a really funny one because it's it found a very unique angle to  entering one of the, I guess, more competitive like affiliate landscapes, which is hotels and  like hospitality.

42:09 But, it's literally mapping out It's a directory to find hotels with jacuzzis  in them. Ooh. It's a whole directory. DR 11, couple thousand monthly organic visitors. And the  keyword is quite literally hotels with jacuzzi in room. There's 7,000 people a month looking it up.  Holy cow. imagine the affiliate angles that you could do that they're already um implementing  here.

42:34 Like, these are not These look really, really nice, but when you view the deal, it just  goes to Kayak and there's you know, affiliate link. So, very straightforward. I would say the  only one that I can predict with any sort of remote accuracy are those that monetize through  display ads. And so, what I look at, again, lead generation impossible to tell, but what I look  at is where their traffic's coming from.

43:00 So, you get paid more when your traffic's coming from the  United States or other tier one countries, which there's a a list you can look up like AdSense tier  one to tier the first five countries on that list right there. Exactly. Yep, exactly. And then, of  course, how much traffic they're getting, and then I'll look at the niche itself if it's in something  that is high in High in cruise ticket.

43:20 Which is a little bit foggy, right? You just have to  think about what advertisers would consider valuable. The notoriously low-paying websites,  niches I should say, are gaming. You know, you can get a million I met a guy with a million  monthly visitors, and he was making very similar to my Drifting Directory, which is getting like  50,000 uh organic monthly visitors.

43:42 So, it really depends on the niche, and that's the biggest  variable. Now, how did you get to these? Like, could you go back a couple steps? Like, back to  the the homepage or whatever when you log in to Ahrefs, like, what are you typing in to even find  these cool opportunities? Ooh, so, are you talking about finding these actual websites? Yeah, cuz  you showed me some cool examples, but how did you get those?

44:07 Like, how did we get there, you  know? Like, what do you search for in that search bar? Or which tab on the top of the page are you  clicking for? Go to the keyword explorer, again, type near me, but in my opinion, this is like it's  very much less efficient than all the other ways that you could do this. Although, you can find  some gems here. I actually really enjoyed it, and um, it's just kind of like easier for me to talk  to it and say that here's my structured process on finding ideas and vetting them, and I'll

44:35 explain  exactly what I explained to you, which is like,"I don't want you to give me pumpkin patches near  me."I don't want you to give me plumber near me. I'm looking for real untapped underserved niches  where there's an existing website that's doing well with a low DR under 20 and that gets some  kind of substantial traffic and then it gives me a few ideas and I'm like, this one's bad,  this one's great.

44:59 Let's do more of this and it's really not that novel of a way to find ideas,  but between Claude Code, the Tido and even like scraping databases. Like I recently scraped all of  the sites on Mediavine, Raptive and Ezoic. 27,000 plus websites. 24%of them by the way, which  are directories. So that was one way that I found ideas and started to analyze like what these  top site portfolio owners do, which a lot of the time is they find something that works and they  just build the same type of website over and over and

45:37 over again. Like the top portfolio website  has 118 sites. They're all forums. It's kind of interesting. But going back to ideation is like I  only come to the keyword explorer when I actually get the idea from Claude chat or Claude code or  the Tido and then I will vet it in the keyword explorer and then of course look up the existing  successful version of the competitor.

45:57 So yeah, like just to show you the visual, let's just say  like hotel directory, right? I would look up some kind of directory, click around. Let's say I  was curious about this one. I would take the root domain like so and then head over to the site  explorer and then from here I'm crafting the story of like can a small potato like me overcome this a  very authoritative SEO presence in this particular niche around hotels.

46:29 And even if I see this, I'm  not freaking out. I'm not immediately quitting. I'm going back to the search engine results page  and maybe testing a more long tail version of this keyword. Like hotels with jacuzzi. Gotcha.  directory. And then doing the same thing until I find successful versions. Like this looks just  small, I can just tell. And I'll just plug this in, look at the root domain.

46:55 Okay, it's a DR21  and it gets a couple of thousand monthly organic visitors. That's within range. Anything under  like a DR25 or DR30, that's a that's beatable in my eyes. Yeah. And so now I'm asking myself,  if I were here, would I be able to meaningfully monetize this in any way? And if I think I can,  then I'll go and build it. Got you. Oh, Fray, this has been amazing.

47:19 If people want to learn  more, where can they find you or your business or anything? Fray Chew on Twitter. That's where  you can find me. Okay. Anything else we should have covered that I neglected to ask you about?  I would say just like just build, like if you're contemplating it. I meet a lot of people who spend  months building their first directory.

47:33 And when you're trying to get good at anything, I think the  best way is just to not have any expectations to make money quickly and just Any more reps. Yeah,  and low expectations. Yeah, just have fun with it and start building stuff. Beautiful. Fray,  thank you for your time. Of course. Thanks, Chris. I firmly believe the best business to start  right now is one that implements AI into small businesses.

47:58 And so I have a community where we're  doing exactly that. It's called playmakersai.com. I'm in there instructing myself. And we have 22  other experts. We have dozens of people in here that make thousands of dollars a month based  on things that we taught them in the community. How to learn AI, how to implement AI, and how to  find customers that will pay you a lot of money for it.

48:18 So check out playmakersai.com and I will  see you there. If you like this content, please share with a friend. Give it a like or comment  below and we'll see you next time on The Krutner