The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Mon, 21 Oct 2024
Join me as I chat with John Rush, a serial entrepreneur, as we dive deep into how to build and scale directories. John shares his strategies and frameworks to for how to use AI and SEO to build and scale cash flowing directories.Episode Timestamps: 00:00 Intro01:12 Why directories02:59 How to find directory ideas08:43 Building your directory19:47 Promoting your new directory:23:27 SEO for Directory29:53 Data/Content for Directory 34:25 How to monetize Directory 42:29 What are the multiples for Directory 45:20 How large can a directory became1) Why directories are hot right now:• More content online = higher need for curation• People trust well-curated directories• Less SEO competition than other niches2) How to find directory ideas:• Use Google Keyword Planner• Look for high search volume, low competition keywords• Find available domain names that match or are close to target keywords3) Building your directory:• Use no-code tools (like Unicorn Platform) for speed• Start simple - focus on listing items, not features• Use AI to generate initial content and structure4) Promoting your new directory:• Share on relevant Reddit threads (carefully!)• List your directory in other directories• Engage on social media, especially Twitter• Focus on SEO after initial validation5) SEO strategy for directories:• Start with ~10 high-quality articles• Use tools or AI to generate SEO-optimized content• Focus on internal linking and site structure• Add trending items quickly to capture search traffic6) Monetization strategies:• B2B sponsorships and featured listings• Affiliate links (especially for high-ticket items)• Sell anonymized data or insights• Charge for premium listings or access• Brand sponsorships for established directories7) The power of directories for SaaS:• Easier to win SEO traffic than direct SaaS marketing• Use directories to funnel traffic to your main product• Consider buying relevant directories for instant traffic8) Realistic expectations:• $5K MRR achievable as a side project• Up to $20K MRR with focused effort• Million-dollar potential exists (but rare)9) Why start with directories:• Lower failure rate than SaaS• Faster dopamine hits (traffic, first sale)• Great way to learn digital product developmentPro Tip: Don't fall in love with one idea. Launch multiple directories, see what sticks after 30 days, then double down on winners!Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas Work with me and my team: LCA — world’s best product design firm to build apps, websites and brands people love. https://latecheckout.agencyBoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers [BoringMarketing.com](http://boringmarketing.com/)Community Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses http://communityempire.co/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND JOHN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/johnrushxLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnrushx/John’s directory guide: https://johnrush.me/directory-guide/
In this episode, John Rush breaks down how you should start an online directory, how to ideate for an online directory, how to build an online directory using AI, and how to grow an online directory using AI and SEO. And he just walks through the entire process. People are making 5K, 10K, 15K, 20K a month with these online directories. They're super easy to create.
He thinks it's one of the lowest risk ways to start a startup. I'll let you decide. Enjoy the episode. We got John Rush, king of directories, on the pod. You've heard him here before, but today is a special episode because what are we learning today, John?
Well, we'll learn how to come up with ideas for directories, how to validate them before you build them, how to build them, and how to work on SEO once you build them. So basically, all three important steps you have to build successful directories.
And why you should care about this is we're kind of entering this golden era of directories. We're starting to see them be more and more popular. People want curation and directories provide that. So if you're looking for your next startup idea, directories is a great place to start. And I'm excited to get in with this. Just dive deep in directories. I haven't done this with you.
I figured we might as well do it publicly. Yeah, that's smart.
That's 100% correct. So just to add on that, the reason directories are so big now and they will be much bigger in the future is that as there's more content on the internet, the quality of the content becomes more important. And I think directories are solving this pretty well because people trust directories. If it's a good directory, they trust it that...
It's a well-curated content, and it has some reviews, ratings, and the quality is high. And the person running it understands the space and picks the right things there. So I think people will be outsourcing the decision-making for the content to the directories from Google, because now they ask Google, and that's...
That's becoming more and more relevant as we see that the top search results of the Google are mostly dominated by all the hacks.
All right, well, let's start with step one. How do we find a directory idea that is worthwhile to go after?
Yeah, so there are many ways of doing it, but the best way is to start based on keyword research. So the keyword research is a way to see whether people search for certain keywords and certain phrases. And even if you think that certain idea is great, but often other people might not think so. And you can figure out whether that's true or not by seeing what Google says about that.
And Google has this tool called Keyword Planner that people usually use to plan their ads. But you can also use that tool to see the traffic for directories. Not for directory, for keywords. And I basically spend hours in that tool every day, just throwing all random ideas into that tool and seeing whether there is traffic or not.
And I can show on a real example, I have even an idea I want to test today. And I will show you how I would test that idea, actually, right here on the platform.
Amazing. Amazing. So while you're pulling that up, today's episode... It's going to be like a live cooking session. We're going to find an idea and we're going to go basically build this idea. So if you're listening to this on audio, it might be helpful to head to YouTube.
Yeah, so one thing we saw is that your podcast has been really great and it's been growing, the startup ideas. And the idea I got from this is that that's the hottest part of the whole startup journey now, is the ideas. And I think the part people struggle the most with are the ideas. And I think... People search a lot for ideas on Google.
And to validate that, I went to Google, or I will go there now. I've done some tests before. And we come here, and we say business ideas. You can remove the filter on US to see the whole world. It's still in English. And now we're going to see whether people search for it. And as you see, a lot of people search for it. Business ideas is almost one million a month. That's a lot.
And competition low. This competition is about the ads. So people don't pay for the ads for this keyword. But finding this domain name is pretty difficult, because the next thing you have to think about is, like, I have a keyword, and I want to make a directory, and I want the domain name of my directory to match the keyword. If there is a match, then it's gold.
Like, for example, I had this directory called Next.js starters, and it was exact match of the keyword, exact match, like. letter to letter. And I launched that, and I opened it back in three months, and it has a lot of traffic just because it's perfect. And it's .com. In this case, obviously, this will be taken.
So I go to GoDaddy, and I see whether businessideas.com is taken, and it's obviously taken. So then I have the next group of keywords here. I can sort them. And I can just take them one by one and test them. Small business ideas, little business ideas, online business ideas, all of them. And eventually, just before the pod, I found one that was available, which was the mini business ideas.
And I bought it. So the mini business ideas is a domain I will try. Why? It's good. So it's basically, I will explain now how the domain and the keyword works. So the key part here is that Google has made the change where in the old times, Google would look at exact word match. And now it looks at the meaning more than the actual words.
And that's why you have these small business ideas here, which is really high up here, and basically can replace small with something else that has the same meaning. And if it's available, you can take it. And that's what I did. So I tried tiny, micro, and then the mini was free. So I bought mini business ideas for $9. never buy expensive domains. Like it's always available.
Just be more creative and find the one that's available. So now I have the domain name, mainly business ideas. I have the idea itself. So the idea is the director of ideas.
That's pretty funny. Shh, don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions and I'm giving them away for free. These aren't just random guesses. They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into one simple database. Compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast.
But the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start. I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet. The idea bank is your startup shortcut. Just click below to get access. Your next cash flowing business is waiting for you.
And now I will go for the next step, which is building the directory. So there are many ways of building directories and. The worst way of building directories is going into the code. And I'm a developer myself. A lot of people think I'm not a developer. That's why I always promote no code. But I've been coding for like 15 years.
And the reason I always say that you should start with no code is this. When you do no code, you start faster because you can use templates. But that's not the most important part. The most important part is that once you launch, you have to do marketing. And marketing goes around marketing pages, marketing experiments, A-B tests, and all those things. And also the blog and programmatic SEO.
And all those things... are usually out of the box on most modern CMS or web builders because they have thought about it. That's why they built the whole systems. And when you do that, with Next.js or you hard code that with PHP, you don't really think about the future. And maybe in the present, you may find certain template to or boilerplate for that.
But then you'll have a lot of problems in the future when you have to do the other marketing work because everything has to be done manually. And for example, if you want to find somebody on Upwork who will write certain pages for you and publish them, Now, you can't do that because it's all in code. So you will get some Google Doc, and you will convert that into code. So it's all huge hustle.
And that's why it's, even if you know how to write code and you're great at that, it's 100% better to go with no code, any tool. But I obviously go with my own tool, the Unicorn platform. And let me switch the tab to the other tab now. All right, so here we are.
It's a unicorn platform, like simple website builder that I pivoted into directory builder, I would say, because most directories or most websites built on unicorn now are directories, and that's interesting. And so we go here, and we say Create, and we find the directories. So here are the templates. People always try to overcomplicate things.
So I have this Discord group called Directory Makers, and a guy asked me today, like, I want to make a directory for lawyers, and I want to have this and this and this, like 20 features. And I say, at the first... launch of your directory, the only thing that's important is the items. If you put the out, the ratings, and everything, it will be empty because there will be no ratings.
There will be no users. So all those features, they don't make sense for a new directory. So the only thing that makes sense for a new directory is a simple page with a name and items. And everything else should come later in the month or even a year. So that's why I always start with very simple directory first. So usually it's, for example, this one. So this is probably the simplest one here.
So I pick this. All right. And I can actually simplify my work. So I can ask AI to generate the directory for me.
And I say directory of mini business.
Which, by the way, is insane. I had no idea you can do this.
Oh, really? That's why I do things really fast. People always ask me, what's your routine? And I'm like, I use AI for everything. But I do moderate everything, right? So I understand the quality and I add it. But I always use AI to start off many of these ideas for people who want to...
start a small site project student indie hackers and another founder all right let's see so now it will basically help me to come up with the
with simple things like a menu and the structure, the text, the subtitle. Basically, you could do this all by yourself too, but why not to save time if you can? So it suggests me to basically have the directory here and then to have featured ideas here, which is pretty cool because this is... So in the directory, everything has to be taken into the prism of SEO.
So basically, the more text you have, the more items you have, the more pages you have, the more chance to score an SEO for those pages. And for example, in this case, if you have featured ideas, there is a high chance that you can score for SEO compared to just the ideas, because ideas will be smaller items. And featured ideas, you can probably spend time and create longer pages.
All right, so it's pretty much almost done the work. And now it's a few more seconds. Or it's making the footer for me, I guess. All right, so it's making this also FAQ. So FAQ is pretty important. Yeah, now it's done. FAQ is really important too, because in FAQ, every title here is a possible question people put in Google. That's why the way you usually do with this is pretty straightforward.
So you go to Google. And you try to search for something. So you write, how do I? And then it suggests you all the other options that other people search for. And that makes it obvious what exactly people search for. And that's how you can basically, for free, understand what people search for. Then you put them here into this FAQ. And you answer those questions.
And then there is a chance you can get traffic for this.
So I will show that. Which makes so much sense if you think about it, right? It's... Yeah.
It's so basic and obvious, but you'll be surprised that almost nobody does it. Some things look too easy and people don't try because they kind of expect things to be complicated and then being valuable. And if something is easy to do, it feels like it's not valuable because... Everyone would be doing it. So how to start. So here you see. So how to start a business with no money.
How to start a business as a teenager. That's interesting. I would never think of this. How to start a business as a teenager. And that's a very good keyword. Because it's probably not served well because it's not obvious. And you could cover that. So now I do this research, and I write down all these questions, and then I go back to my page where I will cover them.
So I go here, and I say, I ask AI. item for how to start business as a teenager. So I say work for AI.
And then now it says how to start a business as a teenager. And now it puts the text. So that's it. So now I basically have a pretty high chance to score on these keywords. And of course, if I want to go further, I will make a page that will have this title and full description. But I usually don't recommend making pages right away because it takes more time to make a page than to make a fake URL.
item that's why start with this and then watch the queries in the search console and you will see whether you have any traffic for this keyword and if you have any traffic for this keyword then go ahead and make a page for that then you'll win more traffic so basically my whole approach with directors is this you have to be doing as little as possible to validate all the assumptions and then the assumption that wins
going to take more of your time, and you invest proper human time into that, and you make it really good. Because obviously, AI is not as good as humans, but it's pretty good for these experiments. But then you make it greater with your own hands. So this is my article, my website.
And just to save time, I will switch to the website I just made, because it's pretty much the same, but with the data. Yeah, so I just made it before the call. So this is my directory, the small business ideas. And I have all the ideas here. And my goal is to have, I don't know, maybe 10 or 100,000 ideas here. And I looked at these keywords. So I put small, little, size startup.
So every keyword you see here has been validated for traffic. either directly or through indirect words and same for all the stuff in the FAQ. So every question I have here is coming from, from the method I just used. So that's pretty much it. And here I have like feature business ideas. So it all takes, if it takes you more than one evening, then you're doing it wrong.
Because if it takes more than one evening, You need to redo your method. Otherwise, you're kind of riding on a small car, on a slow car, and you will never get really far with that. So you have to make sure that you're moving fast because there is a chance that everything I've done will fail. There's a really high chance.
And maybe tomorrow or after a week, I will figure out that this will not work. That's why I usually bet for five, six, 10 ideas. And I test them all at the same time so that I remove the chance to be disappointed when one idea fails. That's a pretty good approach, I would say. Don't do just one directory, because it will be disappointing.
And you have to wait quite a lot for SEO to get in and to validate certain assumptions. But if you have 10 of them, then it's faster. So now, the next thing I do is, once I've built the directory, I have to promote it somewhere. So I do a few things. So the first thing I do, I go to Reddit and I search. I just search on Google, small business ideas, Reddit.
When I do that, I will see all the Reddit articles about that. And then I go into those articles and I reply with my URL. Just have to be careful to not be banned. And to not be banned, you have to reply on articles where people actually ask for URLs. And there are articles like that where people ask, do you know places to find the ideas?
And then you put your URL, nobody's going to hate you for that. And there are a lot of articles like that. So for this particular thing, I found over 100 articles. It took me time. You have to search with different kind of queries. And then you don't have to just go into every article and reply right away.
You just make a plan to make three replies a day or one or two just to not be blocked or banned by the Reddit engine itself because it has some rules for URLs too besides the subreddits. So that's number one thing I do. And that brings some traffic. And then the number two thing I do is I put my directory into other directories.
And that's probably the second best way to start on marketing because directories are big. And that's why the other directories might bring traffic to your directory. But it has to be relevant. So you have to find directories which are relevant. But again, you Google for them. And usually find them. And then the third thing I do is I go to social media and I start searching for the same question.
And then when I find the question there, I reply with my directory there, which works sometimes really well. if your directory actually helps to the original question. I had that when Fireship had this, what was that? He had this viral tweet about self-hosted software on Twitter. And I replied with my hosted software directory. And it was the most...
viewed and like replied there and since his post was like a million views mine got like 30 or 40k views it was really good and and the interesting thing that many people don't know is that Google, they don't say so, but they do this. I know for sure. They look at backlinks from social media. And if there is a good tweet with a lot of views and there is your link there, it's so valuable.
And in that particular case, it was like fifth or 50th time I proved that. So right after that tweet was going viral with my link there, the next day I had traffic from Google growing for everything I have, for all the blogs, for all the items. So this is way better backlink than a backlink from websites, actually, now, these days. So that's the third thing I do, social media.
And I spend some time every day on that, like probably every morning. There are tools for that to spy for keywords, but I rather do it myself because search is pretty good on Twitter and it's the same kind of experience, but more native. And then the fourth thing I do is the SEO. And that's probably the most important part.
And I do it after the first four steps, because first four steps help me to validate my idea. Because if I post it somewhere and no clicks, it means that it doesn't click with people. So people saw it, but they don't click it. It means it's a bad idea or the domain name is bad. I have to change something. There's no reason to push it further.
But if I have some traffic and it looks fine, then I go for SEO because that's, that's the key way of growing the directories. And I will show you what I do with SEO. So I've built a tool for that too, but there are a lot of ways of doing SEO and I will walk through all of them, but start with, with the way I do it myself.
Yeah. So. I go here, and so I put my directory here.
And basically, what it does is that it scrapes my directory. It will now try to understand everything that's written on it. It will try to do some research. So it will basically do all the actions I do usually myself. And that's how we build this agent. So I just took all the actions I do and I programmed them into the agent.
And in a minute, it will come up with some ideas on what can I do with the SEO for this directory. And while it's doing it, There are other ways of doing it. So one way of doing it is to use clothing or chat GPT and generate content there. But I would rather recommend using tools for that because SEO is more than just a content. It's a lot about internal linking.
It's a lot about the structure, the keyword research, and all those things. So in this case, I figured out the content of my page and then it found, uh, the keywords and it came up with, uh, with ideas. So these are pretty good, like 10 locos business ideas for 2025. Uh, and it evaluates the possible traffic it can get for that based on the keywords. And I can just.
go further and here i have the plan for 10 articles so don't start with a lot of articles some people just go crazy and you know publish hundreds of them if your site is fresh and the domain rating is low if you publish a lot of articles google will just never crawl them because it will look like spam for google that's why the first month
you should have maximum 50 pages or 50 articles on your website. And then second month, you can do more. So I usually go for 10 articles on the first month. All right, I will approve this one. So now it's working on this article. So it's looking for the keywords, evaluating their traffic, the complexity, and then working on the outline. So it does a pretty good job.
And one way to learn SEO is to watch what SEO bot does and repeat it manually if someone wants to do it with their own hands, because it does it pretty well. It does pretty well with all the steps and all the actions. Yeah, so now we will create the articles and we'll publish them back to my website.
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And that's it. So from that moment, I quit working on this directory completely. So it all takes me usually first day to build and promoted on Reddit and social media. And then the other day for SEO and more promotion. And then I just stopped doing anything with that. And I go for the next directory or I go for other idea. And then I come back in 30 days.
And I look at the traffic and I see whether there is traffic or no traffic. And sometimes there is no traffic. And the thing is that if there's no traffic, from my experience, if there's no traffic, it's really hard to fix that. So I never managed... to make a directory, have no traffic in the month, and then do something so that it actually gets the traffic.
It's very difficult, because if there's no traffic, then something is wrong fundamentally. Maybe the domain name is wrong. Maybe the keyword looks easy, but in fact, it is not. That's why my recommendation is to never fall in love with the idea for a directory, but rather make maybe five bets, and then in 30 days, look at the one that does the best, and then put more time into that.
Otherwise, you will be trying to push the dying horse and will just never work. And in 30 days, I find the directory that does the best among all I did, and then I do the next phase. And the next phase is the data. And that part is even more important.
Because at the beginning, you're just selling the idea and people click that just to validate that they really care, they have the pain, but you don't focus that much yet on whether your directory is actually good. Because if you focus on everything at once, it's difficult to be good at anything, right?
So that's why the first 30 days, I focused only on validation of potential SEO traffic and the interest from people. But after a month, I go full into the data. And a lot of people who build directories fail here, like must fail here, because they don't put enough effort into making the data great. And here's what happens.
If somebody opens your directory and they know the topic, they understand it, they are probably experts. they can quickly see whether your data is high quality, whether you understand the topic yourself and you're not someone who just used ChatGPT to come up with the items, right?
And if that expert who sees your directory sees that the value of the content is high, the quality is high, they really respect that and they really want to share with their audience. And that happened... with all my good directories.
So they all have this moment where an influencer or few shared with their audience because they think it's really good and they will never think it's good if it's actually not good because they understand the data really well. If they come to, uh, let's say I made these directory, it was, um, LLM models. And then first I had, I just hired a guy to fill it out with data and
Then I open it and I see that it's missing Mistrel. There's no Mistrel there. And this is the example where if an expert comes in and they see you don't have Mistrel in your directory, they will quickly realize that you don't know the topic. You would never miss the most important open source project back at the time. So if the data is great, the influencers might share it with their audience.
And from there, your job pretty much ends because now it just turns into the organic system that people share. If somebody shared, then other people also want to share it. Like people work in a collective mind, right? And the only thing you have to do from there is to make sure the data is great. You keep running your SEO business activities, like I run the agent and others can do other things.
But then the key focus is making sure that you check the data, you check the space every week or month, and you make sure that if there is really hot item, appearing, like new item that everybody talks about on Twitter, you have to add it there. You have to add into your directory.
And you have to do it fast because if you do it fast, there's a chance you will actually get the traffic from Google, from people who search for that new hot item right on your directory. And That's why there's very little work to do, but you have to have put attention into the space almost every day. So I have a lot of directories. I don't really do stuff, but I scroll Twitter every day. And
Once I see that, oh, this item is relevant for this directory, I just bring it in. And that's kind of the next wave of growth comes from being early to list hot items on your directory. And Google will find nothing else on the internet to supply to the user who is searching for that. And Google will show your item, your page for that. So that's the whole path.
Well, it's the whole path. So what you've just, first of all, thank you for going through that. But what you've just explained is how to come up with an idea for a directory, how to create content for the directory, how to build the website for the directory, how to grow the directory and how to iterate with the directory.
One of my questions is, great, now I'm getting 50,000 unique visitors a month on this directory. How are people monetizing directories? And what have you learned around the best ways to monetize directories, if there is a best way?
Yeah. Yeah, so there are multiple ways depending on your audience. So if your directory is B2B, it's easier to monetize it because obviously you can go to businesses who have the same audience as your directory and you can pitch them in the banner spot or the sponsor options. That's what I always did.
I had directories of all GPTs and I just sent an email to all GPT owners saying that, do you guys want to be featured on top of this directory? Because we have 30K items. You're just one of 30K. Do you want to be the number one on the top? And then a lot of people said yes. So that's one way. The other way is the affiliate links. And that way works pretty good.
If the items you have on your directory cost a lot. So if you have items costing $10, then you'll make a little money on that because you need a lot of clicks. But if you have items for 500 or a few K, then there is good money to be made there. For example, I have a directory for Next.js boilerplates and I have affiliate links to all the boilerplates and they all cost $10.
quite a lot and it brings quite a good money good income so i would not exclude one way or the other i would say do the first one do the second one like do the sponsoring do the affiliate links and then the third option is uh is to sell the data be careful to not sell the data as a risk because obviously you can't sell people private data but you can sell the
the anonymized data, or you can sell the insights. And that's possibly bringing good income if you find somebody who needs that. And usually you have to sell it to the corporates and you have to pitch that to the bigger companies where they are interested in the percentage, in the distributions and things like that. And the most obvious way to monetize directory is to have a paywall to list.
For example, in this case, it's probably harder for business ideas because why would someone pay to list their business idea? But for example, if you're making a list of nannies,
search for nannies and then every nanny would pay quite good amount to be listed there if you have traffic and if you have the buyers and the same the buyers so that's number four paywall for listings charge 500 or 50 dollars for listings And then the number five is charge for access for those who are most interested.
In the case of director of nannies, if you are interested in hiring a nanny, you would probably pay good amount to get access to the whole database. So you show top five or you show nannies without their contact data, without their photos. And then to unlock that contact data, you have to pay and then you get access to the whole directory.
Either you get access for life or you get access for a month and then you can charge them for that every month. And the sixth is you find... The brand sponsors. That's what I do now. So once your directories are pretty big, you can find big companies, big corporates who don't need the traffic, who just need the brand promotion. Like we have Dev Hunt, for example, and it's really big.
It's the biggest after Product Hunt. And now it's very easy to get big brands like Clerk or like Superbase and others to want to be there. to be affiliated with it, because that's where developers hang out. And they're willing to pay just to be affiliated with the product. So that you write, like, it's sponsored by Superbase. And it's not for the clicks. It's for their brand there.
And they're willing to pay for that every month or every week. So we have very good deals now with a lot of the players like that for ongoing sponsorship. And that's the best one, because A, it's ongoing. Usually, they will pay forever because your traffic just keeps growing. It just gets better for them.
And also, it doesn't destroy your directory because the banners are slightly annoying for users because they will be shown, and you want people to click on them. So you will make them different color, and that annoys some people. But the sponsor links are usually smaller, and they don't annoy people that much. So those are the six ways.
And then the last way is, or there are two more, but they are available for those who have other projects. So if you have SAS project, like I do, and the main reason I started with directories was that I realized one really interesting thing. it is much harder to win SEO traffic for a SaaS tool than for a directory.
So instead of trying to win SEO traffic directly for my SaaS tool, which has some random brand name that has nothing to do with the keyword, that's why it's hard. I'd rather make directories following the SEO-driven approach. I win traffic on directories, and I channel the traffic from directories into the
sas tools and that turned out to be the best idea i ever had in marketing because now almost all my traffic goes not to my products but to directories and then to the products and also directories or computing for the keywords that nobody want to pay for.
For SaaS, you compete with VC-backed companies who are paying a lot for the keywords, but nobody wants to pay for directory keywords because there's no money there. There are no VC-backed directory that wants to compete with you. So that's the good way to monetize directory indirectly. Basically, it's your free traffic which you would otherwise pay for.
And the last one is you can sell directories, and you can sell them exactly to the people who have SaaS tools, who have the same audience as your directory, and they would buy it just to channel the traffic. And I did that. I sold all gbt.co to chip.ai, and they bought it because... It has exactly the same audience, and it was really useful for them.
I think there is probably the best ROI on the market right now for marketing for SaaS companies to buy a directory and channel the traffic. It is way better than newsletter ads or all other ways because directors are pretty cheap. If you look at their traffic, let's say there's a directory with 100K views a month, And you can buy it. And in a year you get a million views.
And in that million views, you can channel at least 3%. So it's like 30K. 30K clicks a year. And you will pay for the directory, maybe 20K. And if you pay 20K, so it's less than a dollar per click. Less than a dollar.
What are the multiples for directories approximately? Like what are people paying for a directory?
There's no system at all. It just depends on the audience because you can have multiples based on the revenue because revenue is usually not that important. The traffic itself also, like some traffic is more expensive than the others. I think from what I've seen, the actual deals, they go from 2K, they start at 2K. So you can find and buy directly for 2K, which has traffic.
So it will definitely pay... the investment back and then the average directories go for 20k in average so small ones go for 2 to 5k and then 15 to 20k the average ones and then the bigger ones go to 100k and i think that's where it stops i never seen a directory being solved for over 100k
And where are people finding, like if someone wants to go and buy a directory, is there a marketplace that people can go to or is this like reaching out to founders who are selling directories?
Well, I just bought the domain called selldirectories.com yesterday, so I will launch the marketplace. That's hilarious. Right now, I see them mostly on small marketplaces, like not the acquire.com, because acquire.com doesn't let directors in because they don't have revenue and they require their revenue.
But then there are these smaller marketplaces for smaller websites, and I see directors there often. For example, one I... seen the directories the most on called micron io i think it's a small one and they had like 10 directories under 10k there some sold some still being sold so but i think the best way to actually buy directories is to go to similar web and
research the traffic, research the audience, research the countries, and then reach out to them. an offer to buy, I do that. And because if somebody put their directory for sale, very often they want to sell it for quite a lot. But if you surprise a founder with a offer for a directory, they might just sell it right away for the offer you made and you can have a better deal, I think.
That's what I do right now.
Last question, and I know you don't brag or really share MRR that much, but as much as you're willing to share, what I like about directories is you can do it yourself or even a micro or tiny team. What sort of scale could some of these businesses get to? How big could some of these directories get to if someone wants to start one of these?
I think the 5K is probably where you can get without being lucky or being too smart. In my case, I would say the average direct rate I have is there. It's on 5K. I know that if I put more time, I can bring it to maybe 15 to 20K. I think 20K is probably the limit for the director right now on the market, unless you want to go full time into that and that's your main project.
But I don't see directors as...
main project so i only see them as side projects and i think as a side project where you have either i have my main projects but other people have main jobs for for that kind of case i think people can expect 5k mr on that and then uh eventually get to the 10k but i wouldn't hope for a lot more than that so i would look at directories as a as a way to fund your life if you don't live in us because that's a good money outside of us or
I think directories are a really good way to start building not software, but digital products. Because starting with SaaS is the worst idea, because you will fail. almost 100%. And then you'll probably feel bad about that and never start again and go back to your job. But with directories, it's really hard to fail.
I don't think anyone can fail if they launch enough directories and if they spend six months on those directories. Because in SaaS, failure means that you don't have growing revenues but in directories if you get to stable 5k visits a month for a b2b directory you will sell four or five ads and you will make 3 4k a month on that and and that
it will stay that way and even if you do nothing it will just grow because you have seo as your channel and seo tends to grow even if you do nothing if it's a directory because directories are in non-competitive keywords so that's why my recommendation start with the directory as your first attempt to build internet business and you will have More fun because you will get the document faster.
So the traffic and maybe the first sponsor, all those things you will get faster compared to SaaS. And then you decide either you go full. I know people who go with directories full in, for example, starter story is a directory too, right? It's a directory of starter stories and he's making over a million. And Protohunt was a directory of ideas first. There was no voting system at all.
It was just a list of products he would just look around the internet and put in and send into a newsletter every day. So there is a way to grow into millions, but also the risk of failing completely is pretty low too.
Yep. Well, I think that's a beautiful place to end. John, where could people find out more about you and get to know you better on the internet?
Twitter is the best place. It's JohnRushX. Or my website, jonrush.me. And I have this directory guide I launched where I walk through all these steps of ideating, building, growing, selling, monetizing. So that's probably something people should look into if they want to learn the directory world.
Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, man, this has been a gift. You gave people a gift. I think directories are criminally underrated. And I appreciate you coming back on the show. If people liked it, you got to like it on YouTube, I guess, right? And you got to, you know, comment and build John up. You know, he came, he shared some secrets. Let's get this. Let's, you know, spread the love and...
And subscribe, and I'll see you all on the next pod.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Later, John. Thanks for coming on. You're the man. Appreciate you.