Cool things that happened in February as a builder with way too many projects • hit 30k YouTube subs • built 70% of my first saas that automates building quality backlinks (via link swaps method) • drove 1,139 plasma leads to plasma centers through my directory crowdsourced 460 plasma price reports • got my 40k/mo visitor directory deindexed and revived it after finding a dumb migration error • built a new SYD Pro dashboard to give beginners a structured directory building process from A-Z • built a fully autonomous TikTok agent with openclaw that creates and posts photo carousels for my directories (costs $100/mo) • vibe coded my own tools that saved $79/mo in software subscriptions Most excited about the saas. Really fun challenge. Lots of nuances and edge cases and testing. Hopefully will have something finished in 1-2 weeks

> Build cool projects that genuinely help people > Have random people go out of their way to offer help/valuable feedback > Improve the product > Product helps more people Why do I feel like this is a lost concept nowadays Btw this happens all the time. it’s pretty much the dopamine I need to keep going

I think my 4-day old (rebuilt) plasma directory is already generating thousands of dollars in lead value 👀 Was curious how many website visitors were actually turning into plasma leads, so I built this analytics dashboard. It tracks a bunch of stuff, but mainly who completed a lead action, AKA: • clicks ‘visit website’ on a listing • calls the center’s phone number • clicks gets directions Quick napkin math. Today 36 plasma donors made a lead action. Cost per click for plasma is probably around $5-$10 (plasma centers run tons of Google ads). So 36 x $5 CPC = $180 daily lead value $180 x 30 days = $5,400 monthly lead value But like, I’m not Google ads. All my traffic is wayyyy higher intent so a $5 CPC seems low. Might be closer to $10-$20 CPC. I could be generating like $10k-$20k a month in lead value which is kinda nutty. All this to say: if I’m gonna sell featured listings, I’d probably want to charge $500/mo per center as a starting price So far the data is proving that my directory is leading to new customer acquisition. If I can pull this off, could be a nice little directory business! Will be breaking down this site in a yt video tomorrow ✌️

Saturday night shenanigans as a non-coder finally seeing what @openclaw is about I have too many projects and a list of things I’ve been wanting to streamline If you’ve played with openclaw, lmk your favorite youtubers/educators/tips 🤝

Going live tonight at 7:30pm PST for a casual vibe coding sesh Q&A in the free directory community You can join here if you haven’t already: ship-your-directory.circle.s… Happy to answer any questions around directories and SEO ✌️

how to use claude code outscraper crawl4ai to build a profitable online directory in 4 days for under $250 1. scrape 50k–70k raw records with outscraper 2. use claude code to clean, dedupe, and structure the data in passes 3. run crawl4ai to verify live sites and filter junk automatically 4. then enrich one layer at a time: inventory, pricing, images (claude vision), amenities, service areas “BuT aN oNlInE DiRecTorY isn’t a ReAl bUsiNesS” first it’s traffic leads. then it’s premium listings. then it’s vertical saas (crm, quoting tools, booking). then it’s agents handling intake, routing, follow-ups. then it’s the transaction layer. episode is available on @startupideaspod you start with organized data and you end with owning the workflow directories are kinda like a trojan horse. watch

Money is a great motivator, but getting people to talk about your directory/project like this will give you all the momentum you need to continue building. Posted in a private Facebook group yesterday. I broke the rules, posted a link to my directory in the post, mods still approved it. It went bananas. Every Reddit or Facebook post leads with value first, never self-promo. No tricks. I just ask myself “what question(s) are people always asking in my niche?” Then I build an easy way for people to access or SHARE that answer themselves (crowdsourcing ftw). If data is your moat, then build a directory 👉 get organic traffic 👉 identify the most valuable information that’s hard to get 👉involve yourself on Reddit Facebook pages 👉 ask people to contribute From there, you’ll be surprised how much people are willing to help & the creative monetization offers that come from this.

None of my directories have ever been massively hit by a Google’s core update I thought it finally caught up to me with this December core update when I saw 50-60% drops in daily organic traffic with a recent build 2 days after the update ended, we’re right back up! Holidays dips core updates are always a fun time 😅 Couple random notable observations with this directory: • Only 37% of my organic traffic comes from Google • Bing Yahoo DuckDuckGo ChatGPT make up make up 48% of my organic traffic Haven’t had time to run a cold email campaign on this to sell featured listings, but would love to start. If you have experience with scaling cold email outreach would love to learn from you do a knowledge swap! Just DM me here 🙂

Might mess around with my first non-directory project this week Started looking up “white screen” in the mornings for productivity deep work sessions Found this website getting half a million monthly visitors. Site is only 2 years old. Impressive stuff Seems pretty easy to build a competing site in Claude code but to win in SEO it’s purely a backlink game. Couldn’t help myself and bought whitescreen.ai Should be a fun little side experiment.

My 2.5 month old AI coded directory is on its way to 10k/monthly visitors Still has zero backlinks, but DR went from 0 to 1 (lol) Wasn’t going to put up display ads just yet but figured why not Want to see what it’s like to apply for mediavine on a directory built with nextjs. It wasn’t too bad! Ahrefs showing position 2 rankings for scratch and dent keyword now which is cool Excited to see how much this will earn at 10k/monthly visits. My guesstimate is around ~$500-$700/mo

In the last 24 hours, I vibe coded a fully functional website builder for people who want to start their own run club. Think this unlocks a new frontier of directories programmatic SEO micro-saas combos Short version of the game plan: • Over 100k people a month look up “run club” into Google • A LOT of people want to start their own run club but don’t know where to start • I’m making it frictionless to start one (create website, create events, manage attendees, email reminders and payment collection for paid running events) • Main competitor charges $45/mo for mostly the same features • Will layer a directory on top of this and create upsell features that people can unlock (building a site is free, collecting payments will not be free) • SEO: All new websites will be an extension of mine (i.e. runclubs.com/freys-run-club) and the idea is that people are mainly promoting their run clubs on social. Any visitors or backlinks people drive to their run club will effectively be boosting my domain authority too! Insane times!!! I’m noticing that a lot of micro-saas tools are just scheduling/booking softwares tailored to an industry (i.e. rage room software, massage booking software, etc) A lot of them also have really bad SEO. Maybe I’m crazy but I think this is a coolest combo I’ve ever experimented with Directories = distribution SaaS = defensible monetization Website builder = crowdsourced programmatic SEO Only started learning Claude code 4 months ago too 👀

2 month update on my first AI coded directory On its way to 6k/monthly visits No backlinks, DR 0, 99% US traffic. Just good on-page SEO and vibes. This is when I usually consider putting ads on the site with mediavine. I’d guess this would earn in the ballpark of ~$300/mo but this is a test site for selling featured listings through cold email outreach so I’ll try that first I’ve spent about $480 on this build (3 months of Claude code subscriptions and data scraping costs) so I could probably breakeven quickly But I’m choosing learnings experiments over immediate ROI

We always hear that “SEO takes time” but what does that mean? And how does building backlinks change the timeline? Just broke down the full traffic monetization timeline for two of my directories that earned $3,363 in September One directory took me 6 months to start ranking 1 in its niche (with link building) The other took 12 months to start ranking 1 (with no link building) Here’s the full timeline of when I started monetizing: youtu.be/KWxOaVkV5Ac?si=vCnv…