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July 23rdThe argument in one line.
Directories aren't a single business model, they're a category like SaaS or e-commerce, and the four types winning in 2026 trade off idea discovery, data acquisition, distribution difficulty, and monetization ceiling in almost opposite ways.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You're an indie hacker or solo builder deciding what to build next and want a framework instead of copying whatever's trending on X.
- You already run a directory or niche site and want to know if you picked the right monetization model for the effort it demands.
- You're comfortable with AI coding tools and want to know where the actual bottleneck is: the idea, the data, distribution, or trust.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for a step-by-step build tutorial. This is a strategy comparison, not a how-to.
- You want guaranteed passive income with zero distribution work. Every model here still requires either an audience, SEO, or a community.
The full version, fast.
Directories get dismissed as spammy Yellow Pages clones, but four distinct models are working right now. Novel, social-first directories like outbid.lol and TrustMRR are cheap and fast but rely on hype and an existing audience. Lead-generation directories, like funeral home or lawyer listings, are the most common and have the highest monetization ceiling, but need slow, relationship-heavy data acquisition and difficult SEO. Utility and display-ad directories, like Transit or Hot Springs of America, are the easiest and most repeatable to build, but capped by how much raw traffic they can pull. Hyper-niche community directories skip SEO entirely and grow through Reddit and Facebook group trust instead. Across all four, the real bottleneck usually isn't the build, it's finding the idea and getting distribution.
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00:00 – 00:43
01 · Cold open: a directory renaissance
Frey argues directories get unfairly dismissed as spammy Yellow Pages clones, when they're really a broad category like SaaS or e-commerce with both great and terrible opportunities inside it.
00:43 – 03:02
02 · Three novel directories: pay-to-rank, prove-your-revenue, can-I-vibe-code-it
outbid.lol's pure pay-to-outrank bidding war ($248K in 12 days), TrustMRR's Stripe-verified revenue marketplace, and canivibecodeit.com's $9K/month AI-replaceability directory.
03:02 – 07:04
03 · Grading novel/social-first directories
Cheap and fast to build and monetize, but nearly impossible to repeat and dependent on hype or an existing audience for distribution.
07:04 – 10:16
04 · Lead-gen directories: the biggest category, and the hardest data
The most common type of directory in existence, from lawyer listings to funeral homes; parting.com's edge came from manually calling funeral homes for pricing nobody else published, and the category has the highest monetization ceiling of the four.
10:16 – 12:38
05 · Why lead-gen survives an agentic future, and the utility/display-ad lane begins
Lead-gen is future-proofed because agents will still need to book real-world services on behalf of humans; the utility and display-ad lane opens with Transit, Hot Springs of America, and freecampsites.net.
12:38 – 17:49
06 · Display-ad directories: finding the idea is the whole job
Build effort is low enough for a single AI-coding prompt, but the real weakness is a traffic ceiling: without 50-100K monthly visitors, payouts stay in the low hundreds of dollars.
17:49 – 22:57
07 · Hyper-niche community directories: Grant's homeschool site
Built to roughly $600/month in two months with zero keyword research; distribution runs on Reddit and Facebook group trust instead of SEO, and that trust is also the hard ceiling.
22:57 – 23:33
08 · Most people never finish, and that's the opportunity
Frey closes by pointing out that most directory owners abandon their projects before SEO, backlinks, or trust-building ever pay off, which is exactly why the opportunity stays open.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- outbid.lol made over $248,000 in its first 12 days by letting anyone pay their way to the top of a leaderboard, the simplest possible directory mechanic.
- TrustMRR requires founders to connect their Stripe accounts to verify claimed revenue, turning unprovable indie-hacker income claims into a marketplace people trust enough to buy and sell businesses on.
- canivibecodeit.com made $9,000 in one month just by answering one question, can AI replace this app, for over 1,000 existing tools.
- Novel, social-first directories can cost under $1,000 to build and pay off within 48 hours, but over a hundred copycats of outbid.lol made close to nothing because the win came from being first, not from the format.
- Lead-generation directories are the most common type of directory that exists, and the more boring the niche, like septic tank repair or concrete services, the better it tends to perform.
- parting.com built its pricing-transparency edge by manually calling and emailing funeral homes for data nobody else had bothered to publish.
- Every seven, eight, and nine-figure directory in existence is selling leads in some capacity, giving lead-gen the highest monetization ceiling of any directory type.
- A display-ad directory's earnings are directly capped by traffic: without 50,000 to 100,000+ monthly visitors, payouts stay in the low hundreds of dollars a month.
- Building a display-ad directory can take as little as a single detailed AI-coding prompt and a day of work, but finding an uncontested low-competition niche is the actual bottleneck.
- Hyper-niche community directories flip the normal research process: instead of starting with a keyword tool, you find demand by listening inside Reddit and Facebook groups people already belong to.
- Grant built an Arizona Christian homeschool directory to roughly $600 a month in two months with zero keyword research, relying entirely on community trust for distribution.
- HubSpot's acquisition of Starter Story shows a lead-gen-adjacent directory can scale into a multi-million dollar exit, the same path Reddit infiltration once built for that brand.
- Jonathan Wilke's public breakdown of outbid.lol's costs, $1.80 for a domain, $40 for a database, $580 for hosting, and $89 for analytics, shows how little capital a viral directory needs to launch.
Four directory models, four completely different bets
WHAT TO LEARN
Directories aren't one business, they're a category, and the model that wins for you depends on whether you already have an audience, a community, SEO patience, or none of the above.
02Three novel directories: pay-to-rank, prove-your-revenue, can-I-vibe-code-it
- A directory can go from idea to six figures in under two weeks if the mechanic itself is the hook, like outbid.lol's pure pay-to-outrank bidding war.
- Verifying a claim beats making it: TrustMRR grew by requiring founders to connect Stripe and prove revenue, then monetized the trust it built through sponsors and a resale marketplace.
- A directory doesn't need original data to work; canivibecodeit.com repackaged over 1,000 existing apps into a single yes/no question and made $9,000 in a month from sponsor placements.
03Grading novel/social-first directories
- Novel, social-first directories are the cheapest and fastest category to monetize, sometimes under $1,000 to build with results in 48 hours, but almost entirely dependent on already having an audience or going viral.
- This category is not repeatable: over a hundred sites copied outbid.lol and most made nothing, because the win came from being first, not from the format.
- Sponsor-funded monetization is fragile. If the traffic that attracted sponsors dries up, the sponsors churn with it, unless the directory adds a second revenue stream like a marketplace.
04Lead-gen directories: the biggest category, and the hardest data
- Lead-generation directories, from lawyer listings to funeral homes, are the largest category of directory that exists, and the more boring the niche, the better it tends to perform.
- The hardest part of lead-gen isn't the build, it's data acquisition: parting.com got its edge by calling and emailing funeral homes directly for pricing nobody else had bothered to publish.
- Lead-gen has the highest monetization ceiling of any directory type; the biggest seven, eight, and nine-figure directories in the world are all selling leads in some form.
05Why lead-gen survives an agentic future, and the utility/display-ad lane begins
- Lead-gen directories are the most future-proof model, because AI agents will still need to book real services like plumbers, lawyers, and vets on behalf of humans for decades.
- Utility and display-ad directories, like Transit or Hot Springs of America, monetize simply: pick a high-search-volume niche, publish useful information, and run ads against the traffic.
- The build effort for a display-ad directory is low enough that a single detailed AI-coding prompt can produce a working version in a day.
06Display-ad directories: finding the idea is the whole job
- For display-ad directories, finding the idea is the actual job; most obvious niches like free campsites are already dominated by authoritative sites, so most of the work is scouring for low-competition gaps.
- The core weakness of display-ad directories is traffic dependency: without 50,000 to 100,000+ monthly visitors, the payout stays in the low hundreds of dollars a month.
- This category is the most repeatable of the four; the same playbook, low-competition keyword plus useful content plus ads, works across dozens of adjacent niches.
07Hyper-niche community directories: Grant's homeschool site
- Hyper-niche community directories flip the research process: instead of starting with keyword tools, you find demand by listening inside Reddit and Facebook groups people are already active in.
- Distribution here lives or dies on trust; people can tell when you're being inauthentic in a community, so posting to build a directory only works if you're genuinely part of that community first.
- The monetization ceiling is capped by how big the community actually is, but a niche like holistic healthcare or homeschooling can still represent hundreds of thousands of real people.
Terms worth knowing.
- MRR
- Monthly recurring revenue, the standard way subscription and SaaS businesses report predictable monthly income.
- Vibe coding
- Building software by describing what you want to an AI coding tool and iterating on what it generates, instead of hand-writing every line.
Things they pointed at.
00:55tooloutbid.lol
01:37toolTrustMRR
02:13toolcanivibecodeit.com
04:33channelStarter Story (acquired by HubSpot)
07:48toolparting.com
10:09toolfreecampsites.net
10:27toolTransit app
17:49channelGrant's Arizona Christian homeschool directory (from Frey's podcast conversation with Grant)
Lines you could clip.
00:02
“I think we're entering a renaissance of directories.”
00:50
“It's the simplest, most pure form of a directory. If you want to pay more money and outrank someone, then you can do that.”
01:40
“Are you willing to prove it? Are you willing to connect your billing software to actually show that that's real?”
09:40
“All of your seven, eight, and nine figure directories out there are selling leads to some capacity.”
18:40
“It's not just about finding these high search volume, low competition keywords. It's about finding proof that there is demand.”
23:15
“Most people don't even finish their directories, let alone finish it and take the time to grow it.”
Word for word.
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metaphor
i think we're entering a in the last few weeks i've been seeing directories go viral and make ungodly amounts of money in a very very short span of time i think people on the sidelines think of the word directory and they immediately think about yellow pages or some kind of spammy directory that has no use on the internet which is the reason why i think it causes a lot of polarizing opinions there's people who believe directories are a complete waste of time and they don't understand the concept and there's other people who understand that directories are more of a category like SaaS or e -commerce or agencies, and there are going to be great opportunities and there are going to be bad opportunities.
So I'm going to be talking about four different categories that are winning in 2026. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. The very first category of directory that I see winning is the novel and social first directory.
If you've been on X, you've definitely seen the news on outbid .lol. This is a directory that has gone absolutely viral. It has made over 248.
thousand dollars since august 19th i'm recording this on august 31st so that is approximately 12 days and the idea is very simple you simply pay your way to the top it's the simplest most pure form of a directory if you want to pay more money and outrank someone then you can do that. And that basically created this bidding war that went viral, created a bunch of copycats, but this was the OG idea.
So this is a little bit of an anomaly, but other kind of novel types of directories include TrustMRR, created by Mark Liu. This is a directory of people who willingly connected their Stripe accounts to verify how much money their startup or their business is making. And it has since turned into this marketplace for people who want to buy and sell their businesses.
I think this was built because a lot of people in the indie hacking space, the people building stuff online, they'll claim something like I'm making $50 ,000 a month. But the question is, are you willing to prove it?
And are you willing to connect your billing software to actually show that that's real? So this has done really well. There's a bunch of sponsors on the side, which is why you see a lot going on here.
But this made $44 ,000 a month that Mark just mentioned yesterday. Sponsors are paying him a ton of money. He's also making money from commissions that he makes from people who sell their business.
It's just a really cool idea. And it's clearly turned into more monetization streams. we have canivybecoded .com.
This is a directory that's been getting tons of traffic. I followed the founder as well. His name's Rob.
He basically created this directory to... tell people whether a software could be vibe coded or not. So you can click on whisper flow and you can see this prompt.
If you wanted to copy this prompt and build your own version of it, you could do that. And he also sells sponsors very much like trust MRR. And so this has been doing extremely well as well.
Let me check to see how much Rob said he was making. Apparently it made $9 ,000 in the month of August. So that's pretty insane.
A lot of them are grown with founder led social, meaning the person who built this has an audience probably on X. or twitter and they're able to basically push it out to thousands or tens of thousands of people but with that said i'm going to talk about the different types of things that i think goes into this type of directory succeeding starting with idea discovery skills and i'm going to say that you need to have very high idea discovery skills meaning you have to be very creative you need to be plugged into a community maybe the indie hacking community which all of the owners of these three directories have really kind of been in i think you have to understand where the attention is going when it comes to the communities online.
There's nothing more ripe for virality than seeing someone say they make a million dollars a month only to be caught that they've been renting their supercars or they make a bunch of revenue but their net margins are literally three percent on a million dollars. We've all seen those stories and I think this type of directory, these types of ideas are born from trying to bring probably more honesty to the scene.
Unless you're outbid .lol and you just want to create some kind of . where people just bid to the top with their money. That works too.
I think these types of directories don't need advanced data acquisition like scraping skills because a lot of it is crowdsourced. For build effort and skills, definitely not complex builds in my opinion. As long as you've used cloud code and you're very familiar with how to set up a website, set up billing, set up user auth, I think a lot of that stuff can be learned from scratch in a matter of weeks.
Distribution is definitely the name. of the game here you're definitely going to have the most difficult time marketing this if you don't have an audience or if you're not willing to do seo or organic social media that's just how it is with these novel directories you either need to infiltrate reddit forums like starter story did that eventually got sold to hubspot for millions of dollars or have an audience like these folks have on some kind of platform now because this is mainly social first i don't think building backlinks is really that big of a factor so i'm just going to leave that out time to results I think this goes right at the top.
Obviously outbid .lol making over a hundred grand in 48 hours is an example of that. But even if you have a small audience, especially on X, I think I've seen more people with only a couple hundred followers go viral with a single tweet and they can get word spread very quickly. It's definitely the fastest way I've ever seen a directory monetize.
Although lucky or maybe short -lived, there's really no limit to one of these things. Now, when it comes to building these out, don't think it's very expensive at all.
I think the person who built outbid .lll talked about how much money he spent and it's... It's less than a thousand dollars. So I'm just going to put it in an F tier, meaning it's very cheap to build.
As for future proofing, I would say I would put this in an F, but I actually think it's a C tier because even though a lot of these projects are super built on hype and virality and that dies down immediately, I think TrustMRR has a long life ahead of itself. And there's other examples of novel directories, like there's an AI for that .com, which has now existed for a couple of years.
It still gets millions of monthly visitors. It can very well have like an... entire life cycle as a long -standing directory.
Are these novel directories repeatable? I would say for the most part, no. I think there's so much benefit to being first to market and of course having an audience that allows you to become the first well -known directory in the space.
But it's also just like a lot of people copied Alpi .lol. There's over a hundred or more copycats and most of them didn't make any money. If they did, it was nothing substantial, not even close to the original.
So I would say it's not repeatable. And lastly, is the monetization sustainable?
I would say this goes in the D tier for this one. I don't think in the long run, this is necessarily sustainable just because if you're getting paid from sponsors who are paying you because you have a lot of people visiting your website, if that dies, then those sponsors are just going to churn. With that said, I do think once you get traffic to your directory, a lot of creative monetizations just start coming about.
So if you either pivot or add features that make it useful to be to come back this could be much higher than a d tier especially with trustmrr they created the marketplace people can buy and sell businesses it's really becoming like more than just a place where you can see how much money stan store or chat base is making every month the second type of directories are your standard lead generation directories i would say out of all the directories that i've seen there's probably more lead generation directories than any other type of directory that exists so i just put sam's list up there i put levels io just on the topic of people with an audience he created this directory recently around hotels and pricing but this also includes the not .com a place for mom .com parting .com any kind of lawyer directory that sells leads there's literally thousands and thousands and thousands of these so as far as idea and discovery skills you really don't need any creativity in fact the more boring you get with these types of directories probably the better septic tank repair concrete
Moreover, services literally all sorts of really boring businesses make. some of the greatest lead generation directories. But if you have some kind of AI coding experience, I think the data side of this is really straightforward.
It could be a little bit more challenging if you want something difficult to get like pricing transparency, which is what parting .com did. And I always bring up this example, but they took the time to call and email funeral homes to get these prices. And so it's incredibly helpful for their directory, but that's really the only hard part I would say.
Otherwise it's pretty easy. As far as the amount of effort to build one. of these lead generation directories, you could probably send one really detailed prompt and build this out in literally a day.
But it's the nuances that make this challenging. I think the best lead generation directories in the world do a great job of guiding people through a decision -making process and winning people's trust over so that they do fill out some kind of lead form, take a survey, or even book a call. For distribution, this is probably challenging depending on the niche.
Of course, anything in healthcare, finance, or legal is good. would be probably like A or B tier in terms of SEO distribution difficulty. For building backlinks, also, if you're not an SEO, this could be very difficult.
And the specific type of backlinks in healthcare are really difficult and not only difficult, but very, very expensive. As far as how much time it'll take to see results, this is really slow. You wanna be able to have quality leads and then you wanna be able to build relationships with local businesses.
The second part of that already takes a long time, right? Why should they trust you? How are you gonna leverage?
yourself into these types of relationships. You need visitors to turn into leads that turn into relationships that turn into monetization. For monetization ceiling though, I think this goes right up there in the A tier.
I don't think there is a limit and the most profitable directories in the entire world are, for the most part, lead generation directories. All of your seven, eight, and nine figure directories out there are selling leads to some capacity. They've obviously been building their business for a long time, but there's really no ceiling.
I would say. As far as how much it costs to monetize this, the actual website itself doesn't cost that much. If you're on like a Claude Max plan, you're paying $100 a month.
I'd probably put this in a C because I think there are ways you could just build a very profitable lead generation directory through time and SEO and building relationships. But if you are going to build backlinks in a very difficult to rank niche, those backlinks are going to be very costly. How future -proof is a lead gen directory?
I would say it's very future -proof. In fact, maybe in 10 or 20 years, as we get more familiar with just using agents and ChatGPT or Clod or whatever there is, those agents are just going to be making bookings for local services through directories that are built for a world where agents are visiting websites more often than humans.
Anyways, I do think lead generation as a business is not going to go away anytime soon. These are solutions to human problems that are not going to go away. People are probably still going to pay for lawyers for wedding vets.
vendors, for septic tank repairs, for emergency towing services, all of these different things. So I think this is actually the most future -proof directory out of all of these. Is this repeatable?
Absolutely repeatable. I would say it is extremely competitive. And of course, if you go against care .com, good luck to you.
But I do think you carve out your own niche, your own little corner of the umbrella niche of senior living, for example, and you can make this work. The third type of directory is a directory that provides some... simple utility it could be a tool and the idea is that you just get tons and tons of traffic to your website you can monetize through display ads but you can also monetize through a bunch of different ways like partnerships or affiliate stuff like that one example of this is the transit app .com.
They basically help you find bus schedules and they just make it easy for people to find all that kind of information. They get millions of monthly visitors and they monetize through low ticket subscriptions for people who want extra features. And so they have a few different things going on, but this directory, this website makes millions of dollars every single year.
There's also simple directories like hot springs of America that I've talked about in the past. The idea behind this is choose a high search volume niche, build it out, get 10. of thousands of monthly visitors which this does have and then publish ads or work directly with the hot springs somehow this is a very old school directory free campsites .net gets over 50 000 monthly visitors and it does exactly what it sounds like it just helps you find free campsites and so a lot of these directories are incredibly niche believe it or not there are still many untapped niches that make perfect candidates for display ad directories i built one earlier this month in early august and it's already on pace to hit around 1200 to 2000 monthly visitors so these ideas do exist but that brings me to our first criteria which is idea discovery skills by far for me if i'm building a display ad directory the majority of the time is spent finding the idea.
A lot of the obvious ideas like free campsites are dominated by these very authoritative websites. So you end up having to scour the internet and look through dozens and dozens and dozens of ideas before you find one that could be a solid low competition niche to enter. Otherwise, you have to bet that your SEO skills are strong enough to outrank whoever is ranking at the top for a particular niche, which is still very viable.
for a lot of niches out there but you need to know SEO. For data acquisition skills, I think this requires very little skill, especially if you know AI coding tools. So I would put this in a D tier.
As far as how much effort it takes to build one of these, I would say it's extremely low effort as well. I'm tempted to put it in the D and F tier, but I'll put it in the C tier. If you've been playing with AI coding tools, which a lot of you already have, you can probably build one of these a week.
And it'll be a really, really solid directory with a real shot at getting a lot of traffic and monetizing through... through display ads. Now, when it comes to distribution, it really depends on what type of niche you're entering.
If it's a low competition niche, like the one that I built earlier this month, I was able to get my first couple organic visitors within 48 hours of launching. So I'll just put this in a C tier. Actually, I'm gonna put it in a B.
Distribution is generally... hard for most people including myself building backlinks i'll also put that in a b even if you're building backlinks in a niche where it's considered very very easy it still requires you to send out emails and convince people to put a link on their website if you want to check it out i just made a video around how i build high quality relevant backlinks with real human page traffic in my last video what's the amount of time that you can expect to see results with a directory like this i would say three to six months is considered fast So for that, it's probably a C tier.
Any business takes longer than we think, but these are generally slow because it relies on SEO and SEO by nature is quite slow. For the monetization ceiling for these, this is the weakness of a display ad directory, that's for sure. I'm gonna put this in a C tier.
You're going to be paid based on how much traffic you can generate. And if you can't get over... 10 ,000, let alone 50 ,000 or 100 ,000 monthly visitors, you're not going to be making a whole lot of money.
And so some people who acknowledge this will build multiple small directories that get 10 to 50 ,000 monthly visitors. And each directory might be making anywhere between $200 a month to $2 ,000 a month, maybe more. There's definitely been directories that get hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors that can make five or $10 ,000 a month.
But if you think about the amount of traffic versus what you're getting paid and the difference to get to that level of traffic, 100 ,000 or more, it's pretty tough. It can change, of course, if you utilize different types of monetization strategies like affiliate, digital products I've even used.
You just have to get a little bit more creative and I think it deserves a C tier. When it comes down to how much it costs to monetize this, this is basically free. It pretty much costs nothing to actually sign up for a display ad network like Google AdSense.
And then when it comes down to how feature -proof these display ad directories are, I would say it depends. on the timeline and the topic in the next few years i do think there's going to be thousands of different display ad directories that are still in existence getting tons of clicks but i do think maybe five to ten years later when agents become the main way people look for information online and humans aren't visiting websites manually as often then i do think this type of directory has way less future proofing than other directories so i'll put this in a d tier for now even though i'm truly not concerned about these type of simple utility even informational directories in the next two to three years next is this repeatable hell yeah it's repeatable if we're talking about the general format of a simple directory that targets a low competition keyword provides value and gets a ton of traffic that is super repeatable so i'm going to put that in an a i do think that especially if you find a directory niche that has worked for you where you got a lot of traffic a lot of adjacent niches work really well too if you want to build out a separate directory for that probably the most repeatable directory category out of all of these four and lastly is the monetization for these directories sustainable let's just put it in the c tier for now if you're ranking on the first page of google i've had
websites stay there for a very long time years and it just collects traffic monetized through display ads and it's just a flat line when it comes to my payouts if you're using social media then obviously it depends on whether or not you can keep up the same traction if you stop then obviously your traffic stops so from an seo perspective i would lean more towards it being more sustainable i love these type of directories i still build these directories because they are such great small bets to have and especially if you're getting started in directories this is where i would recommend you start because there's still ideas out there and um you just have to find them the fourth category of directories is the hyper niche community directory the example is based on a recent conversation i had with grant and you can check out that podcast but we talked about how he created an arizona christian homeschool directory the way that this works is completely flipped in terms
of how you would build other directories. And what I mean by that is typically I would start with researching an idea on Ahrefs or some kind of keyword research tool. And based on the research, I will then choose my idea.
But with a hyper niche community, you're relying on Reddit forums and Facebook groups. So you're actually doing a bunch of social listening involvement in these communities to listen in on what problems people experience. And then you go and build that directory based on what people want already.
So it's not just about finding these. high search volume, low competition keywords. It's about finding proof that there is demand for people looking for these things, people waving money in the air, willing to pay to find these things in an easier way.
And then you go and build it that way, which is why I think it's such a smart directory to build if you don't want anything to do with SEO and you don't even necessarily want to post on social media. You just want to live in thriving communities and engage with people who are like -minded to you. And that's exactly what Grant did.
that's how he monetized this very quickly. So as far as idea discovery skills, I'd probably put this in a D tier. Like you don't really need analytical skills and keyword research to find this necessarily.
I think the best hyper niche community directories are ones where you involve yourself in communities that you're actually interested in being a part of. For data acquisition skills, it's generally a little bit slower and harder. For example, Grant relied on people self -submitting their own listings and that's how he got his data.
So for that reason, I'll probably put it in a B as in it's relatively difficult or slow. For the build effort and skills, I would say this is really easy. I'll put it in a C tier because you still probably want to know how to navigate your way through just building a directory, whether it's through WordPress or some kind of AI coding.
But the build itself can be extremely easy. It does not have the B complex whatsoever. For distribution, I would say this is the most difficult because it requires a genuine interest.
or at least building trust within a community. If there's no trust, then you've ruined your only means of distribution, especially if you're not gonna be doing SEO as much. Your distribution is that kind of one -on -one or one -to -many interactions by posting in these groups and involving yourself in an authentic way.
Building backlinks can be relevant for a hyper -niche community, but again, because of the community aspect of distribution, I would say this is probably F, mainly because if you do... have those relationships, you can leverage those to build backlinks easier. How long does this take to see results?
I would say this is very fast. So I would put this in a B tier. Geez, yeah, you could see results very, very quickly.
I didn't build a directory that got fast results, but I did join this entrepreneur's group that I found through a Facebook group that I was involved in. And when I started talking about SEO consulting, I literally got clients so quickly who were willing to pay just from being in that group. It's a little bit different, but for my person, experience of joining a group and being involved and providing value over you know a short period of time maybe two to four weeks that alone can bring you some monetization opportunities for the monetization ceiling i do think this is capped because a lot of hyper niche communities are so specific but obviously there could be massive communities i talked to a few people who wanted to build holistic gynecologist directories and i think that's a massive problem millions of people would be like interested in that.
And there's already communities with hundreds of thousands of people. So in that sense, it could be good. I'm going to put this in B tier.
Ooh, future -proofing is a good one because if it's something like Christian homeschooling, these are things that people identify themselves with. As long as people are looking for these types of resources around these topics, then it's very future -proof. And so I'm going to put this in a C tier.
Is this repeatable? I would say it's not very repeatable. So I would put it towards the top because it's pretty difficult unless you're involved in a lot of different communities and you're actively posting and building trust i think this is very difficult i just think people can sniff that bot energy they can sniff when you're being disingenuous and not being actually valuable so in that sense i'll i'll keep it in in the top which is it's difficult to make it repeatable and lastly sustainable monetization it totally depends on how you're monetizing right if you are able to monetize by providing digital guides or resources to an active community of people looking for holistic gynecologists or even dealing with holistic gynecologists directly to provide them leads or businesses, then I can see this being very sustainable.
If you're monetizing through featured listings, it's a different game. You have to prove your worth. You have to prevent churn by showing that there's actual a repeatable business that you're generating for them.
So for that reason, I'm going to put this in the C because it can go sort of both ways. I do think a lot of these are going to continue winning into 2027.
Ideas are going to be harder to find as more people build directories. But guess what? Most people don't even finish their directories, let alone finish it and take the time to grow it through SEO, build backlinks, do good on -page SEO, improve user signals over time.
So there's a lot of factors that lead to the majority of directory owners just abandoning and moving on, which just leaves opportunities for people with high agency and who are willing to... in some work with that i appreciate you guys watching thanks so much for the support and i'll catch you guys in another video see ya
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
In the last few weeks, directories have gone from a punchline, people picture spammy Yellow Pages sites, to quietly making some builders ungodly amounts of money in days. Frey Chu argues directories aren't one business, they're a category, and he grades four distinct types of them against the same eleven-point scorecard.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:02list
The Directory Report Card
- Idea discovery skills
- Data acquisition skills
- Build effort / skills
- Distribution
- Building backlinks
- Time to results
- Monetization ceiling
- Cost to monetize
- Future-proofing
- Repeatable
- Sustainable monetization
An 11-criteria, A-through-F scorecard Frey fills in live for each directory type, turning a vague pros-and-cons discussion into a comparable grade.
Steal forGrading any business model or content format on the same axes before committing real time to it.
00:00model
The Four Types of Directories
- Novel / social-first
- Lead-gen / relationships
- Utility / display ads
- Hyper-niche community
A category map for directories, ranging from viral pay-to-rank gimmicks to slow-grinding lead-gen sites to trust-based community directories.
Steal forDeciding which directory, or any content or product category, archetype actually matches your skills, audience, and patience.
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
13:58next-video
“I just made a video around how I build high quality relevant backlinks with real human page traffic in my last video.”
A single, soft mention dropped mid-explanation rather than a hard sales break; no on-screen graphic accompanies it.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
