Speaker 1I've made, like, around, like, $150K. It was a $50 backlink. It had Lorem Ipsum on the front page, yet I got a $20,000 lead. He got to $10K a month in six months, which is really fast. It's three months old, already getting 42,000 monthly organic visitors. A Claude Code subscription is all you really need.
Speaker 2Holy cow. Meet Frey. A few years ago, he shut down a shoe business that he'd ran for five years, and he was pretty bummed out about it. 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, 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. These are called directories. Your startup cost is basically one AI tool subscription, and by the end of this, 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 homepage 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. And at the end, we're going to talk about a three-month-old website that's just 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?
Speaker 1It 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. 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 link, 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. And that's what happened. And that single link basically got me onto the first page for a lot of different keywords. That specific website I've made like around like 150K from just in the last three years. So I would say that's probably the most profitable backlink. It was $50 backlink. - Okay. - I mean, there's probably a lot of other reasons, but that was the only link that I built for maybe even ever, 'cause 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 wanna say you can coast, it depends on what your niche is, but that's what happened. I just started getting a lot of organic links because I was ranking position one on the first page. -
Speaker 2Okay. 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. - What would you say to people that are like, directories aren't relevant in the age of AI. Like AI is just gonna get us what we need without us needing to go to a website or directory. -
Speaker 1Yeah. 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 gonna 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 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. - Okay. 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. 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, so much traffic from AI overviews from a fresh website versus other niches where it's like, this one's like 25% of my traffic's coming straight from ChatGPT and I can see in my analytics and it's a week and two days old. So yeah, nine days old. -
Speaker 2Wow. Okay. Well, why don't we start by you telling us simply what a directory is? -
Speaker 1I'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. 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 lead. 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. That's the other common way. But there's digital products. There are like education, like a subscription-based education. Now with the vibe coding, like I truly believe there's just so much more opportunity. I just built a job board two 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 your two typical options, ads and leads. -
Speaker 2You could sell a $19 PDF on how to find the best senior living center for your parent. What else is open? -
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, for the senior living, actually people are doing 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. And so you can literally scrape that public data and package it. But going into 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 who they're reaching out to, when to follow up, notifications, that kind of stuff. So that's like, I think a pretty good, kind of like 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?" I was like, "Yeah, sure, take a look." And I saw a 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 botched my nose. It was like crooked, it was messed up. So I spent $40,000 on a nose repair." - Oh, geez. - 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. That pushed her to create an Instagram handle, scrape public databases to get licensed 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. And so that was like the first thing that was like, "Oh wait, that kind of reminds me of like the first directory build." Then I met another guy. -
Speaker 2Sorry, she had the right why. She had a why that was greater than her competitors why, which made all the difference. - A hundred percent, yeah.
Speaker 1That passion was like palpable. And like that why was very strong. The second person was just opportunistic. He built an NSFW, many directories in the NSFW space. -
Speaker 2So not suitable for work, kind of inappropriate type stuff is what you're saying? -
Speaker 1Yep, yep. And so he got to 10K a month in six 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. Like there's 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 it's 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's- -
Speaker 2He's in it for the money, period. -
Speaker 1He'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. -
Speaker 2Okay, and what got you thinking about directories in the first place? -
Speaker 1At 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. 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 on personnel. I could kind of do it myself. And the two options that I landed on were really SaaS or a website. And at the time, a lot of people were owning these niche blogs. And I was like, okay, well, 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. So it was getting around 30,000 organic monthly visitors. And I just started a job. And I was like, let me put up some ads. And I remember the first month I made like 1200 bucks just from the ads. And I was like,
Speaker 2wow, the heck is this? Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. What niche was this directory in?
Speaker 1This was a this was a thrifting directory.
Speaker 2Okay. Yeah. In the thrifting space. 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.
Speaker 1Actually, there was. 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, Indiegogo. 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. 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 it. So that was my proof of concept that, it was showing up on the first page of Google, it was getting traffic, and it wasn't authoritative. 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 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. And that's what gave me the idea. And that's what gave me the green light to build. And the fact that my whole website should probably target a single keyword, because 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.
Speaker 2Okay, 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,
Speaker 1as long as you can reasonably get to 10s of 1000s of monthly organic visitors, which is very, very possible.
Speaker 2Okay. And at its peak, how much was this website making per month? And how long were you spending on it every month?
Speaker 1At the peak, it was around like $3,000. It would hover because display ads are very unpredictable. I would say like 2300 to $3,000. Because around 1500, to 2000 was coming in from display ads. And then I do sell a $19 digital product. That's basically telling people when new product arrives. To get that I had to call like 100 different stores, which is very unscalable, but proprietary data in a sense, right? You can't find that information online. And that would bring in 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 four months, sometimes I didn't touch it for six months. I still touch it really at all for every six months, I'll spend 30 minutes, just like refreshing content, and maybe building a link or two,
Speaker 2but not a lot of time. And how much of your traffic or interest on this website is coming from like AI tools like chat GPT today versus when you first started it?
Speaker 1I 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 chat GPT. Strangely enough, actually DuckDuckGo and Bing and Yahoo give me more traffic than AI citations for this particular niche. But it's different for other ones.
Speaker 2Yeah. I'm curious to know, like, what did your directories number two through five look like? And how did those go?
Speaker 1Yeah, so two through five. So up to my I think I was batting three for three. And then my fourth directory didn't do too hot. I probably have around like a 30% failure rate. Directory number two was my first legion directory and sort of proprietary data directory. I've talked about it publicly. It's called discover plasma.com. And it basically crowdsources plasma donation pay. 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. And then I built a directory where the traffic isn't an adjacent niche from the first directory, which is actually a solid framework for anyone who wants to build directories. That's why finding something successful first is so valuable, you can build in an adjacent niche. And 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, $400 a month, nothing crazy. Sometimes it would spend a lot of money, but it was spike like crazy. I remember my highest revenue day for that directory was 300, like $26 in a day just from ads. Wow. So very, very passive, crazy 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, 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, I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. But 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. It was called portapottymatch.com. I also talked about it publicly. I don't even know if it's still up, but it was around portapotties. And it had Lorem Ipsum on the front page, yet I got a $20,000 lead. I told this story to a few people. It was the New York Times. I was like, here's the lineup. I need like six luxury portapotties, 100 like standard portapotties. It's no longer up. Yeah, 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. 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, which is instrumental. And 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. And 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
Speaker 2one. So how did the scratch and dent appliance one go?
Speaker 1It is still there. It's called scratch and dent locator dot com. There is an advertised page where I connected my analytics. So you can see how much I've done. I've done a lot of things. I've done a lot of traffic. It's getting I think it's around like six thousand organic monthly visitors and launch a website with ten thousand plus pages to see how indexing works. 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 trait. It's really not the directories. It's learning SEO.
Speaker 2And you're saying in an age of AI, SEO is as relevant as ever. It's not more so.
Speaker 1Oh, yeah. Yeah. I would definitely say so.
Speaker 2As long as humans or robots are using the Internet for anything, SEO is alive and well. Right. Even AI agents trying to find answers need good SEO to find those answers. What tool did you use to vibe code this scratch and dent website?
Speaker 1I use cloud code 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 cloud code to build all my direct.
Speaker 2OK, how many directories in total do you
Speaker 1have 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. Yeah, it's it's really hard to say, like probably around a dozen and roughly 30 percent of those are failed projects. I would say that's accurate. There's I have like thousands of monthly organic visitors coming in. And I just like many of those seven, I just, haven't wanted to do i didn't want to do the sales or i just haven't like monetized it or very difficult time monetizing it like the discover plasma one but yeah yeah probably like
Speaker 230 percent failure rate and then like a month ago i used grokbot to build laredo crane rental.com a directory of not even a directory but like a lead gen service for people needing crane rentals in laredo texas and i got like a five thousand dollar and a twenty three thousand dollar lead in my first two 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 i 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 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
Speaker 1claude 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 other than that it's yeah me prompting claude code to kind of just brain dump my idea and my vision and have it build it for me it's yeah and i i guess i could go in more depth but i don't think anyone who has played with thought 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
Speaker 2any five coding tool out there could handle what you need
Speaker 1to do yeah yeah lovable for sure i even found a squarespace directory yesterday you can use whatever works for you
Speaker 2what other tools are you using to come up with that idea i know you use ahrefs is there anything you're using to come up with that idea i know you use anything else out there i keep
Speaker 1it pretty simple i mean for finding ideas it really helps to use the ahrefs mcp or api connected to your claude code and start to feed it prompts that represent how i look for good directory ideas 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 a low domain rating kind of prove that this is a 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 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 uh 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 on to these prompts that make it easier for ideation which is what i do a lot of the time and that's really it i don't spend time exploring other tools really i would say reddit if anything but like that's a that's a known solid resource i firmly
Speaker 2believe the best business to start right now is one that implements ai into small businesses 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 so check out playmakersai.com and i will see you there what is like the the secret to getting good backlinks because 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
Speaker 1makes money 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 hrefs 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 listicle your resource page i've been doing this a lot this year um i'm getting like a seven percent response rate because that's the next question people 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 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 about and i'll see you there 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 two weeks and then start sending out these emails in a targeted way 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
Speaker 2directly now are you asking specifically for your link to be on the exact same page on their website or any page on their website
Speaker 1so what i do is i'll go back to hrefs 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 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 one of my locations pages sometimes my home page kind of just make it
Speaker 2easy for them okay so you say seven percent response rate is that seven percent like close rate like seven percent of people will put it on their website or they just
Speaker 1respond to you at all seven percent respond and a very high percent 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 three hundred dollars 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 five hundred dollars for a backlink i'm like that's crazy and then on the other hand i've gotten dr60 websites which for people that's there with seo rating
Speaker 2out of 100 and 60 is high it's out of 100 but that's high i mean a lot of websites have 5 10
Speaker 1it'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 i've even got them for free because i'll reach out to non-profits 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 this uh because that does increase the rate at which people agree to put a link on your on their
Speaker 2site now are you able to read like the exact email that you send to these people the first email
Speaker 1yeah i have a templated approach let me just pull it up here i might make parts of this email slightly vague just to protect uh some of my niche sites but um so basically the format is the first sentence is a quick intro and i'll say i'll say hi there or hi steve uh my name is fray and i had an oddly specific question about your post and then the posting quotes and i link
Speaker 2insert like the name of the web page in question yeah right there okay
Speaker 1how to five best drifting spots in denver or something like that okay so if you have their first
Speaker 2name sorry if you have their first name then it's hey first name if you don't then it's hey there and i love the hook that first question i have an oddly specific question like that's got my attention very brilliant yes
Speaker 1and 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 the third sentence is the offer could i pay you seventy five dollars 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 it never showed up on google maps and strangely enough i get 20 000 people a month coming to my site now my fifth sentence is the founder pov where i say honestly this is a side project i'm just trying to grow i'm trying 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 it works really
Speaker 2well 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 i was going to ask about the money 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 you've probably 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?
Speaker 1No, 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 mainly those two things. And then I 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. And so I think like, if it's a higher, if it's a DR 60, I might offer like 75 to 100. Even if it's something like a DR 20 or 30, I'm offering 50 bucks in a lot of these cases, which again, is way cheaper than $300 that a link building service would charge.
Speaker 2Sure. But it doesn't cost them anything. They don't lose anything by inserting your link, right? 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 connected 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 ShadgetPT. And just saying, here's what I'll pay for 40 to 60 domain rating, 50 bucks, 60 to 70 is 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
Speaker 1tried that? I built an entire software that, uh, that autopies that does this. Could you give an
Speaker 2example 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 for people, but whether we link one or not, what does your prompt look like to build this in Replit, Lovable, CloudCode, whatever.
Speaker 1A, uh, like a backlink email.
Speaker 2No, sorry. I changed subject a little bit. Like the actual website, the directory.
Speaker 1Oh, 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. It was a brain dumped, but specifically targeting data acquisition first. 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, and so on. So I would say something like, AEs, which are account executives, basically entry-ish level jobs in tech sales. I want you to scrape the data and find any like small, medium, and large business that is currently hiring SDRs. 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 in the inside referring you. 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 two 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 the CRM will track it. So it'll make it really easy to know when to follow up with people. I'm explaining this and literally
Speaker 2explaining my own experience. Do you use like whisper flow or like just voice dictation and you're just growing down, right? Cause to me, that's the best prompt is me just like rambling. I'm all over the place. And then you just upload it.
Speaker 1I'm using whisper flow.
Speaker 2Yeah. Have you ever been offered any money for one of your directories, like to buy it out? And if so, how did that go?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. I've had actually several people try to purchase my first directory. And actually, that's not even true. I had someone reach out yesterday about a random directory that I built in the trash space, weirdly enough, and the port-a-potty ones. The highest offer that I've gotten 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 SaaS margins, they're like 4 to like 7x, 10x, crazy stuff like that. But it was during a time where a lot of people were afraid of Google AI overviews because they just came out. But I've never seen that super significant drop. But yeah, that was how it went. And I think maybe like three other people offered like 40 to 45k for that.
Speaker 2Wow. Yeah. For the thrift store one or for the trash one?
Speaker 1The thrift store one, I think for one of the port-a-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 Mipsom on the front page. Like, yeah, I'm getting leads. But like, let me just be a good person and just like.
Speaker 2I don't want to scam you.
Speaker 1Yeah. Like, I'm not trying to do that to you. So yeah, it was a pretty decently known founder as well.
Speaker 2Oh, that's cool. Didn't you have like a headlight bulb directory? How did that come to pass?
Speaker 1So I launched that two weeks ago. And so that's a very, very new directory. And I mean, it's. Slowly trickling up, for sure. It is a very interesting experiment in the sense that there's a lot of successful versions of this in different niches. 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 CloudCode subscription is all you really need, especially if you take the. the generous free offers from like Vercel, for example, which is like, think about it like the GoDaddy or hosting for five coders. But there's other options out there. 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 CloudCode 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. So 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. Uh, that's how I'm collecting my data that can cost in the ballpark of 50 to even a hundred dollars, 150 bucks, depending on how much data you're scraping, you can scrape your data through CloudCode, but I don't really spend. Money on anything else besides CloudCode and backlinks sometimes Supabase. Cause I have a lot of projects there. So I'm paying $10 a month. Yeah. Domain. Yep. Obviously not much else.
Speaker 2Please. I need you. I need you to send me your stories. If you or someone, you know, made thousands of dollars in a short period of time with a business, a side hustle, a growth hack. I don't care what it is. I want you on this podcast to give you free publicity and to help grow my podcast. So if that's you go to TKO. Yes. Dot com, fill out the form. If it's a friend of yours, send them TKO. Yes. Dot com. Have them enter your name and I'll give you a thousand bucks for the referral. That's TKO. Yes. Dot com. So tech stock. You can't live without CloudCode, GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, Ahrefs data for SEO. Anything else? I would say resend.
Speaker 1Resend is really solid for email marketing. Yep. Um, also very generous, free, free plan 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.
Speaker 2Yeah. So we're almost out of time, but do you have a few minutes to share your screen and log into 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, or here's what might seem like a good idea on the surface, but is actually not. And here's why.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. All right. So this is entity search.us. It's official business entity. It's a directory and it's 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. It gets 42,000 organic monthly visitors at a DR 21. So again, out of a hundred, this is in the range of something that is absolutely beatable from like an SEO authority perspective. And they started, they started. It's in during the summer, around mid July. So this is maybe three months old, roughly actually. Yeah. Pretty, pretty much on the dot. And it's not even offering anything that unique. It's just convenience. So it's a very boring idea. Yeah. So this is a, this is a cool one. I think this is another quite new one here. It's called geo blackout.com outages mapped live worldwide. For all of these places, website outages or power outages. I think there are power out power outages. interesting and so this one's doing pretty well as well so it's a dr9 i think this is possibly the first dr9 low authority seo website with this much traffic 134 000 organic visitors so it could
Speaker 2be doing so much
Speaker 1better i mean but 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 yeah but not all the time but yeah it could be doing better 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 trade schools near me.co find top rated trade schools and programs online this could be like an interesting like potential lead generation or something like that so i think this is a good place to start but i think it's a good place to start because i think it's a good place to start and i think this is a good place to start as well because i think it's a good place to start and i think that's a good place to start and i think it's a good place to start and i think it's a good place to start and i think it's a good place to start and i think it's a good place to start and i think it's a good place to start and i think it's a good place to start and i think it's a good place to start and i think it's a good place to start and i think 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. 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 really solid. And so that's a really cool one. This is more of a, I actually really like this one, tubstays.com. This is a really funny one because it found a very unique angle to entering one of the, I guess, more competitive affiliate landscapes, which is hotels and hospitality. But it's literally mapping out, it's a directory to find hotels with jacuzzis in them. It's the whole directory. DR11, a couple thousand monthly organic visitors. And the key is, it's a directory to find hotels with jacuzzis in them.
Speaker 2Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out, you're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile. Share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.
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