If you've got weekend plans, you might want to clear them because you're going to want to take action on this episode. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show. It's the business podcast you can actually apply. Today, we're exploring the unique side hustle of online
directories, why they're a great starter online side hustle, how to come up with your first directory idea, build the thing out and start making money. Now I've got a little bit of experience in this space, but nothing like today's guest who is a master at quickly. building and marketing these little side projects, launching 30 in the past year or so, monetizing a dozen of them, and even selling one, which was allgpts.co for a five-figure exit from johnrush.me.
Josh, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thank you for having me, Nick. I'm ready to share. All right. I'm excited for this one. Start us off with the pitch. Give me the elevator pitch for why directories. How come you've been investing so much time, effort and energy into them in the last year?
curious resource of the future and today's attention. And the best way to win attention is to see what people search for and then have your products and services shown up on the search results. And then I had this idea that maybe if the search will be more and more polluted with AI-generated content. Eventually, people will want to find places to search for things where they trust.
The curation, they trust the author who has put the time and expertise to build up this list. So then I thought like the directories will... really thrive in a world of infinite choice where users... don't trust the former ways of searching for things such as Google and other places. And they will rather trust a place that focuses only on one type of item. and knows everything about that. Okay, so the idea is to become almost a mini Google, in a way, for a specific topic. Yeah.
Okay. All right. I like that. And that's kind of the game that I've been trying to play in the side hustle space for a long time. Like, hey, you know, we've become the go-to resource. And, you know, one of the challenges has been... historically relied heavily on Google for that initial traffic. It's great if people know who you are, but it's harder to kind of get that initial traction in the first place. Are you finding success still marketing through SEO?
finding that initial know, like, and trust factor and discoverability through Google? It's getting harder and harder for SaaS projects, and it's getting easier and easier for directories. Because I see that the pattern people have with the search, when they search for something where there is a large number of items to choose from, they're a typical...
Pattern is that they're not searching for the answer. They're searching for a place where they will find the thing. So they're kind of searching for directories. They don't think about that. But in reality, people search for directories for places where they can... have this rich type of content where every item has reviews or ratings or information around it or comments. So I think...
And that game is just getting easier and better and better. I see huge growth on SEO traffic for my directories and I have serious drop on SEO traffic for SaaS projects because SaaS projects usually drive traffic through blogs. And the blog articles are... Not doing well now because so many people can easily generate them with AI. And some say AI blog posts are low quality, but, you know, they do something else. They just take good blog posts and they rewrite it with AI. Now it's a good quality.
I guess it's just the same blog post rewritten and Google cannot spot those rewrites, right? Unfortunately, not yet. So here's my theory. I'm going to go off on a little tangent and then we're going to bring it back. Theory, my hope, is that even in an AI... Like there's got to be some benefit to being a primary source creator, like to scooping a story, to creating a firsthand review, even if eventually that ends up getting scraped and crawled and regurgitated by a million different.
AI tools. That's fine. There's some frustration around that, but there's still got to be... Somebody's got to create this stuff, right? And there's got to be some benefit of doing that. Now, I want to pitch you on... my idea. So historically, lots of like listicle type of posts, best side hustle ideas of 2024 or something like that, right? What
Well, I would like to build and what's kind of been on this project radar is like the side hustle ideas directory, like every everything we've ever covered, you know, in one easily sortable, you know, maybe it has like earning power and a degree of difficulty. And so you're.
argument is, rather than that traditional listicle, 25 best side hustles of the year type of content, building out the database, the directory of side hustle ideas, that could be a different type of project, or that could be a new way to capture. SEO and visitors. Yeah, historically, nearly.
every directory or database of items that managed to survive for several years and kept improving its content has won and driving a lot of traffic. And I've been researching this a lot. Like I've been researching their traffic. growth. And it's insane the amount of traffic going into these directories. So most people don't even realize they actually use those directories because at some point your director will not look like a directory. It will be like a marketplace or a place where you can
For example, even Craigslist is a directory. Even Airbnb is a directory. People think that AI is going to change everything and all content gain will go to zero because AI will just answer your question right away.
I don't think that will be the reality because a lot of questions have no answer. Like AI will answer what's one plus one and you will... trust it but if you ask ai what's the best place to go with my girlfriend for example like whatever answer you get from ai you will not trust it because it's it's a topic nobody has the answer for and then what you actually want ai to do is to say
look, here in your town, I think this is the best place. And here's the link to the directory of the places where I... research this. And what you would probably do, you would click on that link and go and verify yourself why this is a good place and continue your search there versus using...
or AI. So I think from this point, directories might be the only content project that will survive because most of the other things they can be hidden behind the ai chats and users won't really give attention where it's coming from like there will be maybe links and citations but you won't click because the answer is good enough
But for directory type of items, you will always wonder why and what else is there. Yeah, this is really interesting. You know, OK, this could be a small scale weekend side project or it could be some of the biggest websites in the world, like a TripAdvisor. know, a directory of things to do on your vacation, places to stay. Yes, exactly. Yeah. You know, Upwork and Fiverr, like, you know, directories of qualified freelancers. Yes. There's like side hustle directory. And then there's like.
this could turn into a really substantial business type of directory. Now you built dozens of these things. Like talk to me through the... idea generation? How do you figure out what to build or where do you recommend people start there? There are two ways to come up with ideas. So one way is if you're an expert in something and you know something really, really well.
I think I really believe that high quality data will win no matter what. So if you know something really well, you can build directory out of that. But most people don't really have the super expert. knowledge on the topic. So then if you don't have that, then the best way is to go and check on Google what people are searching. So the best way is to go to the Google itself and enter a keyword. For example, you enter dogs.
You say like dogs, and then you will see shelters for dogs or food for dogs or trainings for dogs. And now you have three directory ideas, right? Because probably there is no directory that has a lot of... cravings for dogs and all the ways you can teach all different kinds of dogs. et cetera. So Google helps me a lot. And then you can use other places where people search for things. You can go to Quora and see if people ask, for example, if there is one article there that says, what's the best
a Hummer to buy, for example. And then you will see a lot of answers in the comments. And if all the answers are different, then it's pretty much a directory that was just created under this article, because in some cases, everybody's going to answer this.
same thing like what's the best payment solution people are going to say stripe there's no point of making directory for that because you'll have stripe and other items nobody cares about but in this case you have the items and you can see that people debate whether One item is better than the other. And I would say that such debate is just gold for making directory because A, you have the idea and B, which is even more important, you understand.
how exactly people compare these items because it's not clear. And this part is more important than most people think for a directory. So you have to be really smart on what exactly you present about the item because people don't... come there just to see the list. People come there to see the list and also to see like every item has a lot of stuff about it.
But what are the three most important things about this item? And how do you highlight them so that I don't have to go and search and read and read and read? So you have to save my time. And such Quora article is going to help. Reddit article is going to help. And social media is going to help. How does this differ from a traditional Amazon affiliate site where it's like bestblenders.com and it's like bestblenders for smoothies or bestblenders for juicing? And I see that kind of a listicle.
content with affiliate links and they've got their own, you know, little blurb or, you know, we tested this and like a wire cutter type of content. What separates that type of site from a directory in your mind? I think it is a directory too. So I think... That's just a subset where you take a physical product or any product that's on sale and you niche it down to certain category or many categories. And then you have affiliate links and you make money on that. But I think that space is...
It's difficult to win because, you know, you need a lot of sales to happen through your website. So I usually... recommend people to bet on the ideas where you can find sponsors who will pay you a lot for sponsoring it. Because... It also means that the directory is valuable because it's kind of one way to test is to find a sponsor who will sponsor your directory before you built it.
And that's possible. I recommended that to some people and they did and it worked because, you know, everybody wants to pay for growth and traffic. And if you can bring it, people are going to pay you. But with this, like with lenders, there's no way you're going to...
convince a Blender producer to sponsor such directory. And with affiliate links, you can make some money, but it's really hard because you're competing with all the listicles, like you say, you know, 15 best Blenders. And in this space, I think... especially in Blenders, I think the blog articles will often win against the directories because people don't feel so serious about the thing so that they go into the directory. The blog article seems lighter. But if it's a car or...
a tractor or something more serious, then the director will win against the blog article. Okay, because you have more... perceived expertise in that you've built the entire directory and database and structure around being the expert in that thing. Yeah, exactly. Also, you can...
You can anticipate what people want to know about the topic. For example, if you're looking for a really good microphone for a podcast, there's really high chance you are looking for the lighting and for the camera and other things. And then... If you land on a directory that has it all, like it has five categories, like microphone, speaker, light, camera, and you see that it's fresh, you see that it's done by an expert, and then you click.
on the expert and you see that the expert is producing really good YouTube videos that you really like. you're going to bookmark this place and you will send it to your friends whenever anyone else wants to do the same. So I think with directories, there are multiple plays. So one play is where you just do a side project and you win some traffic, you channel the traffic into your main...
project. But the other way of building directories is to build something that you will turn into full product. And in this case, if you target the people who make podcasts, there are a lot of products you can build on top of this directory. For example, you can connect the people. who sell the services on helping you to make podcasts and also the guests for the podcast. There are a lot of things you can sell to this crowd. Sure, yeah. You could have even a directory of...
the best podcast editing services or something. And some of these service providers may be hungry for growth, so they would turn around and sponsor that. Exactly. Or they would pay for a featured listing or something. And that's, you know, my directory building experience is somewhat limited to.
this virtual assistant site that I had years ago. And it was, you know, directory and review platform for outsourcing companies where to where to find your best virtual assistant. And we didn't do this right away. But after years of kind of paying attention, well, what is what is Yelp to?
What does TripAdvisor do, right? It's like they have the featured listing at the top. It's like, no, this is not necessarily based on any algorithms. It's based on who paid to advertise there. And so that's what we ended up doing, selling a kind of featured listing placement to companies that were looking for extra leads, more than they might get.
organically and that worked out really well. So what I'm hearing is start with what you know or have an interest or curiosity in. Look what people are searching for using tools like Google, Quora, Reddit, trying to figure out, okay, what's that? Looking for a diversity in answers. If there's one consensus winner, it's going to be really hard to build a directory around that, but looking for diversity of answers and some back and forth debate, that could be great. And then maybe like looking...
for higher commitment decisions. Maybe Blender's not a great thing to build a directory around, but if I'm looking for somebody to edit my podcast, potentially for years and years down the road, like, okay, that's a higher commitment type of decision. And similar to MVP Wizards, one of yours, like...
people who are going to build out this product for me. Top website builders, another one of yours, where it's like the switching costs of trying to move different platforms pretty high. So hopefully I get to make the right decision and guide people to the right choice for something like that.
More with John in just a moment, including how to evaluate the competitive landscape before you start, and the most important thing you can do to differentiate yourself from that competition right after this.
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Surprisingly, in this game, really often seeing a competitor is a good sign because you know that people search for it. You know that Google is... actually pouring that directory app, it also means that you have the chance to, because for some topics, I don't know why, but Google never brings directories app and it will always bring the blog posts there. So I usually... expect several directories in the first 20 pages. And one thing that will scare me off...
is seeing only directories on the first 20 pages. For example, if you search for AI tools, you will see so many directories that there is no room there. But I would say that's the only topic that you shouldn't... go after like the only one because everything else if there is one winner there there's always room to play and I don't really look at the competition at all in a negative
sense, I look in a positive sense. If there's competition, it's good. So it's just the opposite of a normal business where you're looking for less competition. All right, let's say we've got this idea, we want to build it out. Maybe it's the podcast editors, or maybe it's the dog trainers, or it's, you know, something where I've got some background or some level of expertise in.
and I want to go and build this thing. What's your first step? The first step is to find the idea. So you have the idea. The second step is to find the domain name, because that's really important. If you don't have a good domain name, It's really hard to win. And it takes time to find a good domain name because .com is usually taken for everything that's obvious. So you have to be creative.
In my case, I spend weeks and months looking for domain names. Not like every day, but every day I would spend a few minutes. on that. And eventually you find something. Like every single time I found something that was really, really good. So you find a good domain name and then you find a website builder to build it. And I really recommend people to use no-code builders.
Because they have everything out of the box and you're not in the business of inventing technology here. You're in the business of data and you should focus on data, not on the technology. Any specific ones that you like? Yeah, I use my own Unicron platform, which I... pivoted into being directory builder. It lastly built a lot of things, but also directories. So that's Unicron platform I use mostly, but people can use.
any other tools, I would say there is no bad difference between the tools. So my builder is tailored for directories, but other builders are also capable of that. And if you know Webflow, or if you know VEX, or if you know WordPress, just go for them. If you don't know anything...
I would recommend using my tool because it's really good for a directory. And then once you build that directory, it should take you not more than a day because if it takes you weeks doing that, you're just putting the wrong focus on the wrong things. It's really difficult to succeed with... anything if you're not putting your priorities straight up from the start. So you have to put from the start that
This is a data project. This is not a technology project. So you have to spend 10% of your time on technology and building the thing and 90% of the time on actual data curation because that's exactly what's important. I've seen... directories with millions of clicks every month that look like They're from 90s. Like they look really bad, but they have millions of clicks. The next step for you is to curate the data. And that's the most difficult step because you have to find everything.
And this topic, because usually the people who land on your directory, they know some of the names. They know. because otherwise they wouldn't be searching for it. Imagine you're looking for websites to book your holiday travel. That's a directory. You open that, and you don't find Airbnb there. The typical user will... will quit because they will think like someone who made this has no idea what he's doing, right? So that you have to make sure you have all the big players.
because that's what creates trust for the visitor. But also you have to have the players which are not big because users came there to find something they don't know yet. So the big players are there not for the clicks, but for the trust. And then the rest is there for the value. And usually to solve that, I use scrapers or I hire someone for a week.
I give them the task and they just spend every day searching for the items. They put them into Google sheet and then I go through the sheet and I just visit every item and I make sure it's relevant and it's new because also... It's not about quantity. It's about quality.
You should not put items from 90s. Like, it should look fresh. It should look like it's done yesterday. Because one thing with directories, a lot of the websites on the internet are abandoned and you still land on them. But then once you fill... it hasn't been updated for a long time you lose interest so people have to feel like this is an active project so don't put there some boring ugly items just make sure that you filter them and you put good stuff there
And that's it. Okay, so that's an interesting point. It's not necessarily about building out the yellow pages with like every single business possible. It's like trying to curate the best or the most active. Yeah. Well, you have two options. One, if you go after... having everything there, if that's your value, and if your directory is called all companies in the world, like that's the name, you have to have them all. And when people come in there, the first thing they're going to do...
is they're going to test. Like people always test places and they will come and they will search for the least known company in the world to see if you have that. And you won't have that probably. And then they will think you're lying and the whole trust is gone. That's why if you have that...
directory, you have to make sure you're capable of creating the data. And it's really hard. You have to put insane effort to get everything. Okay. So instead of attempting every side hustle or all side hustles, maybe... You pivot that to best or top or something like that. I would pivot that into, you know, like lazy side hustles, for example. And then you only focus on things that take little time. Got it, got it. For example, like you have to niche it down.
somehow because if you say best then why best it's not easy with with best a lot of people use best but i would not recommend best. Okay. Another couple examples came to mind just as we were talking here. ThemeForest and the whole Envato suite of different marketplaces that they have. Like ThemeForest is a marketplace for different WordPress themes. So it was very meta. Looked for directory WordPress.
themes and got you know that was the top search result like into their directory like oh here's a bunch of WordPress themes that are good for directories another one that came to mind would be like solar installers. Like this is a higher ticket type of project. Like if you want to put these panels on a roof, like who do you trust? How does it work? And then you can go and curate that type of kind of lead generator. And then like there's built-in monetization. Like you might have to.
to go make some deals with these companies. But I imagine if it's a $25,000 install, they're probably willing to pay you a little bit for that lead. Yeah. I actually think that the safest way to build directory is to go after really high tickets. or in my case, for example, MVP Wizards, it was really successful having very little traffic because you'll need a lot. You can have 100 visitors a day on this directory.
And you can monetize that really, really well if you have a commission system where you get 20% on the money they pay to the vendors and they pay like 10K, then you get, you know, 2K back. And that's a lot. So one deal. you 2k and that's huge so i think that space is really I don't see a lot of competition there because for some reason, the directories mostly target high traffic niches because I think most directories still go after affiliate market.
flipping links and channeling the traffic and very few go after high tickets and a few sales. So I think that would be where I would go if I had nothing going on right now. I'll go there. Okay. Yeah. It doesn't need a ton of traffic volume or even a ton of search volume. It's like you can be the go-to authority in that tiny niche. Then all of a sudden, if you've got the attention and the leads, yeah, people will be happy to pay for that. Exactly.
You don't even need the items. Like with solar power, for example, you can say solar power in Texas. And then you have to just find all who can deliver it in Texas. And that's not a lot. You can spend one evening and find them all on the internet and then you put them there. And then the chance that you will score high for those who search for that is really high because it's a local search.
And local search is way easier to win than any other search because Google really rewards such websites. You know, scraping... Data sounds kind of technical. Hiring a researcher sounds less technical. Talk to me about this data curation process, because this is the value add in a lot of ways. And then adding your own, I guess, insight expertise. layer on top of that. But to first collect the meat and potatoes, the listings themselves in the directory, that's kind of the hard part here. Exactly.
I think you should do it yourself first so that you understand where to find them. You understand how to evaluate them because... If you hire somebody to do that or you're scraping, you still have to read through all the items and make sure that they have, like you have to put some categories, tags, and you have to make sure that the description is roughly the same size.
so that you don't want to have one item with one... sentence and the other it has a book in it because you want to have a similar thing there so i think you should spend a few days yourself just doing that and collect first 50 or 100 items yourself i always done that but i always did that for every directory i have
And once you understand it really well, just write the spec for it, like where to search, what to look for, and how to describe it, et cetera. And then the job is easy to outsource to people too. So you would go to a place like... Upwork, for example, and you would put your entry there, you would pay a few hundred dollars for that, and somebody would do the job for you.
What kind of data points are you going to make sure to collect in that initial research phase? I start really small. I go for title, URL. and description and the category. I even skipped logo and images because I think... It is not that important. And then later, I just enrich the data I have once I see the directories working out. But at the first, at the initial stage, it makes more sense to put more effort into finding more items.
and putting some time into writing descriptions because I write them myself, and that's very interesting. So if you don't write them yourself, there's a problem. They all will look the same. Like, for example, you have a microphone, and they will all say... Good microphone works best for podcasts. And then you find hundreds of those and they all have the same text on them. It works great for podcasts and everybody loves it. No value, right? So your job is to simplify the suffering.
for the users because they have unlimited choice and they want to pick one. And that's why I look at all of them and I try to come up with descriptions to actually differentiate them. This one is the smallest microphone or the cheapest microphone or the microphone that works well when there's noise around, etc. So some microphones have that.
option where you can have it cheapest, biggest, smallest, et cetera. Some don't have that. But for them, you just say something like it's rather good value for money. And then for others, you say it's durable. It lasts for 10 years. But if you're not pro, maybe go for something cheaper. So I'm kind of like a reviewer who reviews every item.
based on everything I find about the item on the internet. And then I put a few lines on every item on the directory so that you don't have to do that work I've done. So I'm compressing my work and making it easy for you to pick the right one.
Okay. And this is like one of my earlier projects was a, I guess you could call it a directory for footwear. It was like, where can you find the best price on your next pair of shoes? But in that case, it was affiliate driven. And so the retailers would happily give you their...
And so we had... of kind of develop our own type of algorithm to compare this product to this product and make sure it was really the same and what kind of common words are we going to ignore and which ones were we going to say like okay this is actually the same thing and this is you know the price but like that's kind of the
the value add here? I think you had a good term, normalizing data. And I think most directories bring that as the key value because most potential directories or the niches, they don't have that. Nobody has ever done that. And just doing that is huge value. And if you're looking for the idea, that's one way to evaluate the potential. If that's not done in the space, then it's...
something you should do. Because if you do something that doesn't exist, like in my case, for example, with all GPTs, what happened is that it didn't exist when they created it. And then you...
with all the traffic from Google because people search for something and there's nothing except you there. And even if you're on the page number five, people will find you because they're looking for a specific thing. People always say to me like, Probably the directory thing has too many people in it, and every directory that could be created has been created.
I'm like 99% are not created yet. 99%. Like every day when I search for new directory ideas, I find so many that I don't know how I will ever build them all. at least 10 per day. So now I'm actually giving away these ideas because I have no time to build them all. And if it already exists, find a way to differentiate it in some way. Make a pivot to niche it down.
of a different market the the advice that stood out several years ago on the show from john lee dumas was like hey when i started entrepreneurs on fire i was the best daily entrepreneur interview podcast i was the worst daily entrepreneur interview podcast because I was the only be the best worst and only like if you can be a market of one if you can be the only it can be a really powerful place to play
More with John in just a moment, including the role of AI in your directory project and marketing and monetizing the thing to start making some money right after this. Tell me about the role of AI in either this data curation or this, I feel like there's got to be a way to accelerate because I spent nine years like building out this virtual assistant directory and every time like trying to come up with new, you know, what new companies.
launched this month and like, should they be included here? And then hiring somebody to go research them and interviewing the founders. Like it was very tedious and time consuming and there's got to be a way to accelerate this stuff today. way easier to run directories because AI can normalize the data. AI can look at all the items and extract certain properties of those items for the business ideas.
directory, AI could say, like, you probably should add a column of difficulty. How difficult is the idea? And I always use AI for that because AI is really good at looking at the big picture, looking at a lot of data and extracting certain common properties. I just... take the data as csv file and i just paste it into chatgpt and i ask questions like what columns should i add so that people could filter on those columns and then what are the categories
I should use to categorize this list. And sometimes I ask it to shorten all descriptions, for example, because I wrote long ones and just made them all roughly the same size. And it helps a lot. So I don't think I would... even near where I am now without AI. There are tools that help you to find the data. There are tools that help you to enrich the data, like these AI agents. But I wouldn't use them if you're building just one directory. So I use them myself because I have a lot of directories.
But if you're building just one directory, I would not use AI. too much. So I would probably stay with ChatGPT and just use it as assistant. But still, you have to run the show because one problem with AI is that it makes things look average. So if I use AI and you use AI, will look very similar, very similar. And if you're, as a human, you're below average, then AI is better than you. But if you're better than average, then you'll be better than AI. Okay.
So what I'm hearing is starting pretty lean and basic with as few data columns as possible, and then... Once it gets traction, then it's adding on, going back, doing the additional research, adding the logos and the images and the extra columns that people might want to filter on and all of that other stuff.
But only after, okay, I'm starting to see some interest to this. I'm starting to see some initial traction. Like, what are you doing outside of just relying on SEO? Like, oh, build it and they'll come. Anything you're doing proactively to, you know, to breathe some life, to get some algorithms.
churning in your favor to get some traffic to these things? Yeah, you have to because Google will not respect your website if there are no backlinks. It will ignore it completely. So you have to find backlinks. To find backlinks, there are a few ways.
So the first thing you have to do is you have to go to places where people ask for this. For example... the Quora article or Reddit article where people ask for those microphones, for example, and then you go there and you say, hey, I built a directory for the microphones. Check it out. And the interesting thing is that the directory is the only type of business that you can just plug your URLs into.
replies and nobody getting hey for that because it is a value add somebody did all this work for me yeah like really because It's free because it's a free product, right? Because there is no paywall there. And I've never had even once the case where people said, like, why are you bringing the URL here? Because on Reddit, it's really hard to put. But this one is fine. So you go to Reddit, you go to Quora, you go to social medias, Twitter, LinkedIn.
And you find hundreds of places where people talk about that. And then you place your URL there, but you don't spam it. You just try to answer the questions. For example, the tweet says, what's the best microphone? for a podcast, and then you say, hey, I have directory with all the microphones and I think these three are good based on like whatever. So you do a little work for them in the text so that it doesn't look like automated reply. And then you say...
but you can go and look for yourself on my directory if you want to learn more about it. And it works really well because you gave little value and some just use that and then others will click and learn more. And that part is probably... the most important part of the directory because you get backlinks from those replies. It's not like reply giving you a backlink for Google. It's just when you reply...
Somebody sees your link and then there's high chance that people will link to your URL from their blog article or from somewhere else. That's your hope being present in the social media discussions. Got it, got it. So yeah, it's user-generated content. But by virtue of being visible on these, especially Reddit and Quora too, but like all these sites that already have a bunch of search traffic that if people are looking for this thing, you have expanded your surface area of opportunity of luck.
Now other people can find it and get traffic both from the thing directly and from other people now linking to you in editorial content with hopefully a dofollow link. Yeah, exactly. So that's the thing about directories. Directories are by design made. in a way to be shared by others. So you have to do very little.
for others to share your directory. Very low. Like with SaaS, it's difficult because every SaaS, it has a paywall and it has a million competitors. But with directories, it's usually not the case. And people... both share and link to it a lot, but you have to show it to the world. So you show it through replies on social media and Reddit. And then if you have good directory, the rest happens. If nothing happens.
then you know why because directory is not good enough and often that's the case like if you build your first directory I have this directory guide community where I guide people on building directories. And it's really interesting to watch how people build and how they approach it. And most people put such a little time. Almost feels like in school when you want to pass with the little effort possible and, you know, get that whatever grade you get.
go to next year. So I think a lot of people have that kind of mentality to business too. But with directories, you have to be really pouring your heart into it because people can feel that. It's really easy to judge directory and understand. whether somebody put time into it or not, because if you are a user of the directory, you understand what you're searching for.
You understand what you need. You understand the space slightly. So it's really easy to judge. That's why there is no chance you can make bad directory and it will score. But at the same time, also there's a small chance to make a good directory. that nobody's going to link to or share. So it's really fair space. I've got like dozens of ideas of like, oh shoot, we could build this. We could build it. And to me, that's the mark of a good episode. So I'm sorry to pause and derail.
I've taken notes. I've got it like that's good. And that's really cool to kind of spark this and kind of broaden the definition of what it could be. And there's limitless niches, limitless potential here, I think is really, really.
cool, the stuff you can do. So going back to the marketing stuff, it was, you know, this first wave of backlinks and mention was from this user generated content, answering people's questions, what happens in hopefully getting some, you know, positive word of mouth from that.
Anything else? What happens next? There are very few things you have to do. It's rather you have to repeat the same thing. So you have to repeat the work on data every day. And that's the thing. A lot of people ask me, what's next? Often, and I say, do the same thing again.
Better data, more data, improve the data, add the data. Find more content on the internet where people talk about it, plug it in. Because internet is not static, it's dynamic, and every day there is new stuff there. And also create your own content. 2, you have a lot of items and there are a million ways of
creating articles out of it, for example, best microphones for that. And you can make all those listicles that others do as well. And since you have the data, you can use the data too. Like, for example, if you have data on clicks or something. like that, you can have an article saying the most popular microphones this month on my directory. And nobody knows your directory, but you...
But people will think you have a cool directory because there's an article that uses your directory as, you know, when you say Craigslist, it's a brand. And if you use your directory name the same way, it will be like a brand too. And it's on the brand at the start. but if you behave like a brand and you create articles, it'll work. And then you also find all the articles on the internet that talk about this and you contact the author and you tell them that you have this directory and...
if they want to link to it. And very often they will say yes because it will improve their article by linking to your directory. They will improve it and they will do it. So basically you have to hunt for more backlinks because SEO game is your game and SEO has two factors.
One is backlinks. The other is the content. That's why improve the content every day and make the articles. And then the other thing you can do, you can create little tools. For example, if it's a microphone, you can have a little tool that... test the microphone, if it's working or not, or something like that. And it's easy to make those tools because you can either pay somebody a few hundred bucks for that, or you can just use AI.
generators and create a tool. And those tools are pretty cool because if your directory is having items, blog articles, and also little tools about the same space, then when the visitor comes in... they have this feeling that you put effort, you're an expert, you know what you're talking about, and you're serious because most directors are not like that. And also there's really high chance.
to be linked to. Like you take this link and you go to all articles talking about microphones and you say, look, I also have a link to test and you can link.
people to this. So that's kind of the boring part of the job. So you have to just do these little things every day. And do you have an example of a tool that worked for you on one of yours? Yeah. For example, I built this tool to test a website for broken links i built it with ai in like half an hour so you put url there and it tells you if there are any broken links on this url it just looks at the whole page so that one
And a lot of small tools like that where mostly you enter something, you click something, and then something else happens. It can be a calculator, it can be a generator, etc. And now it takes less time to create the tool than write an article, because all these AI generators for code, they work really well. You don't have to be a coder for using them.
Fascinating. On the monetization side, we talked a little bit about sponsored listings or even the title sponsor of the entire directory. We've talked about kind of a lead generation model, especially for high ticket services, where if it's a multi...
$1,000 solar install or something, yeah, we'll pay you for that lead. Just strike up those partnerships. We talked kind of on the affiliate side, more traditional product affiliate marketing, you know, best blenders, best podcast mics type of stuff. Anything else that we should know about on the
monetization side once this thing is built, once it's got some traffic and traction? Yeah, so there are two ways of monetizing. So one is by using technology and one is by using sales. So by using sales, you can just sell the ads, you can sell the data. So one, you can sell the ads to anyone. It doesn't have to be somebody who owns these items. It can be anyone who is interested in the audience.
Like if it's microphones, you can sell ads for those who sell light, right? Because it's the same audience. And I usually do that really very often. And then the other way is to have... paid listings so you don't let anyone list anything on the directory and you charge them something for listing it works really well if your directory is large and you expect a lot of people listing
things there, like yellow pages. And then you have these freemium directories where you show something and then you hide something else. So it can be anything. It's kind of a gamification. So you either show all the items. and you hide the rest. You show 100, and then you hide the 500. Or you have categories. For example, you have, if it's cars, like the cars that are cheaper than 30K, you can view them. And if it's more expensive, you have to pay.
No, there was, oh, I forget the name of the company, but it was like industry research reports where they show you like a little bit of the data, but then some of it is grayed out and you got to pay them the $29.95. It's a step, it is. Yeah, maybe it was that, yeah, whereas, you know, if you want.
The full report, you can pay us for it. Yeah, they do really well with that. I pay them, and I can imagine how much money they make because they charge a lot. So you have to gamify so that people get some value out of your direct... for free and maybe even the first time they come
They are satisfied, but then they come there the third or fifth time, and then they will pay to see more. It can be either items or it can be the metadata of the item. For example, you see all the items, but you don't see reviews or you don't see the contact information.
information. In some cases, the contact information can be hidden. So that's really common on job boards where it's like, hey, you know, we'll show you the profile and some of the skills and qualifications. But if you want to be able to actually contact this person for an interview...
you would hire this person, then you're going to have to pay us. Exactly. Anything around humans is going to work that way. Like if it's a marketplace for skills or jobs or anything, then you have humans, then you have their contact information. You can hide that and charge for every click.
your subscription and then show it completely. And then the other way is to let businesses... claim their their items so you add items with really poor metadata and then you email all the owners like like intentionally poor like not not bad but poor right so you just Put title and that's it, for example. Okay, just not super complete. Got it. So it's still there. Yeah, exactly. So it's still there. But if anyone is logging in...
for items in this directory, they would probably ignore the one that has only title. But they can still click on it. And for the sake of quantity, you have it all. For the sake of trust, you have them all too. If I know that item and I see the title, I'm happy. It's there. Okay. And then you email all the owners. And I think this is probably the strategy that will make you most money.
at the start. Yeah. So you just find all the owners, you email them and you say, hey, your item has 20 people viewing it last week. Do you want to improve the listing? Like right now it's this. Yeah. And do you want to improve it? Like add.
images, add text, add contact information, add a link to your website or something like that. Then click here and claim the item and pay for it. And then it's verified as well. So you just... list the perks it's verified with a check mark your contact information is there and the link is do follow because that's important very often
Got it. There's so many different directions that this type of project can go and what you can build and how it can make money and how you can get traffic. And it's just lots of different niches and ideas spinning around in. In my head, anything stand out to you as far as mistakes to avoid or common problems? Because you built dozens of these things and by your own admission, not all of them.
So does the hit rate improve over time? Or what do you see as mistakes to avoid for new directory builders? Well, one thing, use short names into domain name. Interesting.
for the name, the higher is the traffic in my directors. There's like direct correlation between traffic and the name, because when you're looking for a good name that has high traffic on Google, often it's something... out of few words and it's long and don't go for that so don't do the best places to go and eat sushi like that's too long Yeah, something six words, you know, dot info and like, no, no, no. Yeah, exactly. So buyonly.com or org, like these two.
Only these two work for me. The rest didn't work even with short names. Yeah, I guess .org sounds authoritative. Like, hey, we're building the... go-to database directory in this niche and we got the .org to prove it. Yes. Yeah. Sometimes .org is better than com if you target nerds or technical people or like the people who actually like that domain. You don't have to be like...
registered nonprofit or anything. It's just like anybody can register it, right? Exactly, exactly. But you suddenly look like nonprofit and that's why I should trust you more when you have the org, right? But both work really well. And more like a business level mistakes were that I didn't put enough attention into.
thinking through the directory because like it's for one hand directory is something simple that lists all the items in the space but you still have to have this wow moment where people enter it and and they fall in love with it. For example, when I launched AllGPT, the reason people loved it, there was one clear reason why I won that game, and it was there were 30K GPTs, 30,000 GPTs on the internet.
It's a lot, right? How can you pick one? There were no reviews, no ratings, nothing. And if I put that on my directory, it would... I won't have enough data to rank on them, too. So I was thinking, like, I had to figure out how to sort this huge list because every type of GPT had 100 clones. Whatever you type, it has 100 options. Which one do you choose? I invented this really simple hack where I went to Google and I counted the number of backlinks to every GPT in a rank based on them.
Because the more backlinks you have, the better is GPT, probably. There has to be some correlation. And if you made a clone of somebody's GPT... It was clear, like, for example, you search for math teacher, for example, and then one item has 500 backlinks and other has... Zero. It's obvious that the other one is not used by anyone. It's probably not even good. And when I did that, suddenly the first page of my directory was so good.
You come there and you try something and you see somebody put time into this GPT. And when you make a directory, you have to really think hard on what can you do that people... try it and they say, wow, it's cool. And in my case, people loved it so much that they went on Twitter and they started sharing it. So I did nothing. So I literally just launched it and it went to slip.
And I woke up and it was the most popular directory in the world. So why? Because some people saw it. I made a tweet, but it was a small tweet. And some people tried it, liked it, shared it. And then it was network effect because it was good. And with some other directories, I didn't do that. I just collected items and I made it okay, but it was not great. So I think one thing people should really understand is that directors are easy.
to build, but it's really hard to make it great. Every directory I didn't put enough time into failed, or in my case, I don't say it's failed, it's just in get enough traffic. And now I have to go back and do the real work so that...
It's actually a good directory. Yeah, I love that line. Easy to build, hard to make it great. I think that's a metaphor for so many different side hustles and so many different businesses where it's like the motivation is so strong early on and you get the thing going. But then to really have that mark. flywheel start to spin, it's got to be great. Exactly. You know, to capture people's attention and get them to do some...
of that marketing on your behalf, how to turn one user into two, have them spread the word. It's got to be really a strong product. And that's the challenging part in turning through the data and sprinkling in your own industry. knowledge and expertise to make it something that is really worthwhile. So I'm excited. Like I mentioned, dozens of different ideas spinning around as a result of this conversation.
What's next for you? You've got all these SaaS projects. You've got all these directories. You've got the directory guide at johnrush.me. What's got you excited these days? Well, I really like to help others build businesses on the internet. It just feels so good when I see someone launching a directory that's built on my website builder that's using my...
blog generator, and the founder has read my directory guide. So I'll just do more of that. And I think my whole mission is to build tools and guides for... Founders. So now I launched one more guide called Founder Guide, where it's not just the directories, but it's the other things too. How to build SaaS projects, micro SaaS projects, no code platforms. And I'm launching more products to help.
The founders, for example, I'm launching one product specifically for directories. It's basically an AI agent that does the curation work for you. You still have to help it and you have to moderate it, but it does. the scraping of the internet, it does the enrichment of the data, and it finds the emails of the items, and then it helps you send them an email to claim the item. So basically, I'm trying to automate the whole directory thing for myself because I have more than 20.
I don't have resources to run them all, and I want to automate it. And when I automate it for myself, I basically automate it for the others too. Well, very good. We've got the founder's guide on top of the directory guide. We'll link up all this stuff. Unicorn platform was the directory builder platform of John's. We'll link all this stuff up in the show notes for you. All you got to do is follow the show notes link in the episode description.
and I'll get you right over there. John, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for stopping by. Let's wrap this up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. enjoy the process not the outcome because it takes way longer than anyone expects or anyone says and for me personally it took more than 10 years to get to a place where I could build
things and make money on them. So I think if you start this and expect to make money in a few months or a few weeks, you're going to have difficult times. Well, come on. Where's the clickbait headline in that? It took 10 years. Exactly. So I see things people don't want to hear, but I think the only thing you have to be focused as a startup founder or somebody who's doing site hassles is just be better than yourself.
Today you have to do better than yesterday and just try to learn because the business and side hustle is no different than musical instrument or sport. There's no secret. To become good at sport, you have to just do a lot of the sport. And I think exactly the same goes with side hustles or businesses. You have to learn.
You have to learn to sell, learn to build, learn to design, learn to market. And it takes years to do that. That's why look at this as learning. And then as a side effect of this. One day, you'll get great results. Be better today than yesterday. Enjoy the process. Wise words from John Rush. A couple of takeaways from me before we wrap. I liked this section on niche research first, trying to come up with maybe even a potential monetization model before you go in.
to it, looking at the existing competition and seeing if there are already directories ranking, which, you know. An earlier me would have been discouraged by that. But no, John says, hey, that's actually a positive sign that Google is rewarding and ranking. If I can build something that is better, that's differentiated in some way, then there's a chance to compete and win there. I like the...
you know, speed of execution part, this like, you know, quick launch, quick validation. Like, look, if nobody likes a thing, then either back to the drawing board or try something new. Like maybe that just wasn't good enough. And I liked your line about like AI.
makes things look average. Don't be average. You gotta love the niche, fall in love with this problem, and really build something that is great, that is worthy of... traffic and attention in an era of really fragmented attention so build something that's great ai makes things look average don't be average
Whether you're a first-time listener or a long-time listener, thank you so much for tuning in to The Science Hustle Show. If you're wondering what to listen to next, make sure to build your own personalized playlist. How it works is you go to hustle.show, you answer a few multiple choice.
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