My website makes $34K/month (built in 3 hours) | Starter Story

Curse director. We're building a weekend and now it makes 35k per month. This is Pontis. A developer bored on his flight to France when he spotted an opportunity. The second he landed, he called his friend. They coded for three hours straight and launched a simple directory. When I landed, I called Victor and said we need to build this directory for curses rules. That three-hour build is now doing $34,000 a month with 99.8% profit margins and they only work on it three hours a month. We posted a site on X and it instantly took off. I have never seen something like that before. I thought directories were dead in 2025, but Pontis has proved me wrong and showed me that anybody can do this. So I brought Pontis onto the channel to break down exactly how he did it in this video. We'll dive into exactly what tools he used to build a $34,000 per month website in just three hours. The secret to why his directory took off when many others don't and his advice for anyone building websites like this right now. Alright, this one is crazy, so let's get into it. I'm Pao Walls and this is Starter Story. Hey guys, I wanted to pop in here with a very important message. Black Friday is around the corner and you know I'm gonna be doing something I probably shouldn't. To celebrate over 700,000 subscribers here on YouTube, I'm gonna be giving away one of the best deals we've ever done on Starter Story. Last year, our early bird Black Friday deal sold out in less than two hours. In this year, I think it'll sell out in less than one. And I don't want any one of my subscribers on YouTube to miss this, so here's the deal. I've set up a VIP list where you'll be notified about our Black Friday deal before anyone else. And trust me, it's gonna be one of the best deals we've run in years with extras and bonuses. I probably won't ever do again. If you want to get notified as soon as it's live, just head to the first link in the description and you can join that VIP list right now for free. Thank you everyone for watching and supporting the channel. Let's get into the video. All right, Pontus. Welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story? Yeah, my name is Pontus and together with my best friend, Victor, we spent the past two years bootstrapping our store up midday, which is our long-term focus. Along the way, we built cursored recreate, language, and several other open-source projects. We love building in public, testing ideas quickly and showing that even a small week imported can turn into something big. One example that is the directory we built, cursored directory. We're building a weekend and now it makes a 35k per month. Okay, cool. I mean, you're building a lot of cool stuff, but what I really want to dive into is the directory. Can you explain what a directory is and what your directory does? So basically, a directory is, of course, made for discoverability to find something that you are interested in. And cursored directory, of course, is made for recursive developers to explore and find new ideas. We've grown the site to put in 9,000 registered users 2.2 million unique visitors since launch. And then, of course, we have a grocery on 99.8% and operation cost is just under 500 bucks. And, of course, it's open-source. All the rules are merged in GitHub, so the maintenance cost is like three hours per month, and then we continue building our main store up. Well, that's absolutely insane. You just built this directory in a couple of hours, millions of people out there. It's made tens of thousands of dollars. I want to understand, how do you even get the idea to do something like this? The whole idea came up when I actually took the flight down to Mute de France. It's a three-hour flight, and I downloaded a lot of videos to look on tech-heavy stuff, and I downloaded some cursor things, and then I discovered this common pattern about rules. So it was kind of mind blowing from me that there were no place to find these rules in one specific place. You can google and find some obscure guests on GitHub or some forums, but no real-tier answer to find these rules in one place. And that's basically how the idea came up. Okay, cool. So you find this idea. It doesn't exist yet. How do you go about building it? Both me, Victor has a lot of experience building apps and websites for the years. So we knew exactly what we needed to do. I called Victor as soon as I learned on the Airbnb and said to him, like, we need to create a directory for rules, for cursor rules. In just a matter of minutes, he's turned up thinking I'm starting to design. Well, I started an initial project with NextJS, and I created a hard-coded JSON file with some rules that I found online. And in a matter of, like, half an hour, we had something up in our cell, ready to click around. I bought the cursor dot directory domain, which was a really, really good domain, according to the site, of course. So we built the site, completing three hours, and then we just continued to iterate. Victor and I had been working together for several years. We already know our DNA in terms of deciding code, so that had a lot, of course. So I mean, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to bring on the channel. The fact that you did it in three hours and had the balls to actually launch it and ship it and maybe be okay with it not feeling perfect. What would be your advice for anyone watching this that wants to ship fast? Yeah, so, of course, I have this main startup that we focus on day in and day out, right? We work a lot of hours. Usually, once a week or twice a week, we find these things that you can really do really, really fast, but we hold off. But in this case, we didn't. And I think that's something that comes like a thread through how we work. We find these ideas, and that comes together when you dial in and work fully on something they committed to. And being out there and seeing a solution that you can do. Yeah, I think it's a combination of dialing into what you're doing and being out there and finding ideas at the same time. Okay, cool. I'm, what I'm hearing now, what I think is really cool is for the cursor directory, you didn't have a lot of expectations. And you just said screw it. I'm going to launch. So that's where I have a few more questions is, okay, yeah, sure. You build this. You build it really fast. Nowadays, anybody can build stuff fast. How did you actually launch this and get millions of users? In the first week, that was also the first week in France. So we did a bunch of different things. So I posted the cursor directory on X, of course, at the initial release. I mean, we're building public on X. We share everything we do all the way to the code, right? We're fully open source. So I think we had like one million impressions on one of the posts. And of course, we had several posts. So we have a developer following from the beginning, but then I also posted on hack and use. We ended up on the on the front page and a lot of youtubers started to cover cursor directory into the videos. So there were a lot of coverage around cursor directory. We grow steadily because we share knowledge along the way. And I think that really tied together with cursor, right? It's a developer focused community. And we build this super fast. We have this tech heavy design approach. Okay. So one thing I noticed about cursor directory and your other startups when I was checking them out is the design. You may not realize this, but I feel like your design is a competitive advantage here. When I go to cursor directory, this thing is beautifully designed. And I can imagine that was one reason why it kept getting shared to a bunch of other people. So I want to ask you for anyone watching this, how to design beautiful apps, how to do it quickly, what are the secrets to designing products well? Yes, so basically we have a formula. Of course, it helps a lot to have a great designer as a co-founder. It comes down to the small things that are also the hardest. Like keep it simple. Find something that you like. Stay with pride and find the patterns and the tonality of all the websites that you like. And of course learn from others. If I will start from the beginning, I will probably find websites that I love and take bits from it and learn from that. In this case, of course, we already have a design system. We already have components that we can reuse from our previous startups. So it was much, much easier for us. There are a lot of great designers out there that you can follow on X. It's a huge community you can learn from. I usually tweet out that design is more important than ever, especially in this fast pace AI-generated website world that we started to live in. The design will actually be the things that puts you apart from the competitors, right? Because it's easy to create a website today, but all of them usually looks the same. So it's not much that you need to be different on, but you need to find the tonality and the angle that you believe in is right. And that's going to be your advantage. What I love about Pontius' story is that he built the MVP of his app in just three hours. He did not overthink it. He just saw an opportunity and shipped it right after he landed from his flight from France. This is proof that if you know how to build with AI, you can move insanely fast. But here's the thing. Most people waste weeks stuck in tutorials or second guessing themselves. And this causes people to never actually ship. Well, this is exactly why we created Starter Story Build. It is our program where you will build and launch your project using just AI tools in a matter of weeks. You'll master how to talk to AI. So it will build apps for you. And the best part is that you won't even be doing this alone. You'll be a part of a group of founders all sharing feedback and staying accountable every single day. So if you're ready to finally ship your idea, head to the first link in the description to claim your spot. We are starting our next cohort very soon. So be sure to go there and claim your spot right now before it runs out. Okay, now let's get back to the video. Okay, so another reason why I wanted to bring you on Pontius is I haven't heard of a directory that has been crushing it in a long time. I remember a couple years ago, directories were kind of taking off. Nowadays, I don't see that as often anymore. I thought directories were dead. Clearly, that's not the case. So my question for you is do directories still work in 2025? Or are they dead? Yeah, I mean, I get these questions a lot like aren't directors dead, but it truly is. Directly still is incredibly successful in 2025, especially if you build something for the right audience. And in this case, of course, we found the audience at the right time that the core directly solves a timeless problem. Like you need to find something that you're interested in. And in this new AI world, where we're living like cursor, people are starting to look through how to do things and find the right answers. That's where directors really, really shine right. It's a collection of things that a bigger audience are interested in at the same time. And if you can catch that wave, you're really going to find a lot of like visitors and a lot of opportunities. If you catch it, if you can own it, then it's super powerful. Okay, cool, Pontus. Well, thank you for sharing all that. I'd love if you actually pulled up your directory right now and showed me how it works, how it looks, and what's the business model. Could you pull it up right now? Okay, so yeah, this is Cursion Directorate. So you have a bunch of different rules. So you can go in and then you copy those, then you add that to your cursor rules in your editor. It's kind of basic. You can filter on your like what you're interested in. You can see the popular ones. You can see official ones. And then of course, you can search for different things. We enable that you can register and create your own account and be a member of the community. So you can post your own stuff. People can vote on interesting things. There is something that I just share, whatever they are interested in and get upvotes. People can find the jobs and companies can share the job ads. So it's a paid ad that they paid to get listed some months after MCPs came along. And I will also think that made Cursion Directorate really flies. That was the second way where we saw a huge adoption on the site because we created this MCP searchable way to find and extend your cursor experience. And these are also features. You can pay to get on featured on the site. And then we also made it possible to generate your own cursor rules tailored to your website in JavaScript. You have this package asum which defines all your dependencies. You could just upload that and then you get your defined cursor rules back to tailor that to you because we really really saw that developers wanted to tailor their versions or their cursor experience. But it didn't know how to start. And this was a good way for developers to start this to get the grasp of it. All right. Well, thank you for sharing that. Looks awesome. I like to switch topics a little bit and talk about tech stack. How did you actually build this app and what tools do you use right now? So I think this is the important one. You should stick with something that you know and already use every day, right? So we stick with we know. So we chose next year's fully-typed script. Shads in components. Recent free email. OpenPanetful analytics. And just connect with Github and share it on versatile. So versatile is our hosting provider. Payments we use polar which is a great merchant on record to handle payments, especially if you're a company. And then on the productivity side we of course use cursor to code a notion for product management, Github for version control. Every tool we choose to share had the same velocity like no servers, no friction. Just focus on building and shipping fast because that's really what matters right? Getting it out there to our users. All in all 525 bucks a month with a 99.8 gross margin. Okay, well thanks for sharing that being transparent about the numbers. That's an insane profit margin. The last question that I have for you that we ask everyone who comes on starter story, what advice would you have for anyone getting started right now? Whether they're building a directory or building cool SaaS software apps, whatever it is online, what would be your advice? Start. It sounds simple, but here's the thing. When you start building and when you commit to something, you eventually getting dialed in, you create your own luck by constantly finding ways to move forward, shipping, sharing and iterate. One thing we lead to another and there's really no such thing as failure. When you build something, the worst thing that can happen is to do learn and then you take the next step to find your ways forward. Well that's great advice. Thanks for coming on the channel Pontus, sharing all this amazing story, amazing business, amazing stuff that you're building, other than cursor directory. So thanks for coming on sharing. Thanks for having me. Okay, first of all, that advice was amazing. Just get started. You don't know if this directory that you build is going to be a complete flop or is going to make $34,000 a month. There's no way to know that without actually getting started building something and seeing what happens. It all starts with a simple idea and nowadays with what you can do with AI and idea is all you need to potentially build something that changes your life. This is why we launch starter story builds where we will help you take your idea from your head, turn it into a real app using only AI tools in a matter of weeks. So if you're ready to launch your project and you're serious about actually building something, head to the first link in the description to check out starter story build. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.