Claude Code built me a $273/Day online directory

0:00So you want to start a startup that does anywhere between$2 ,000 and$10 ,000 a month passive revenue. Something that you only have to work on 10, 15, 20 minutes a week. But you don't have a lot of money to start. Maybe you have$200,$500,$1 ,000. Well, what kind of business would you start? I would recommend an online directory. A directory is basically a website with a bunch of different links and data. and in this episode I talk about how you can use Claude Code to actually build an online directory that is going to get traffic on autopilot and I brought on Frey and Frey is Mr. Directory and he shows us step by step how to use Claude Code to create a very big directory I really enjoyed having him just take us through the entire process what are the prompts he uses, how to think about data enrichment How do you think about cleaning the data so that you can create a online directory that generates traffic every single day?

1:02Now, I know what some people are thinking. They're thinking, that's really boring. An online directory? Come on. I want to build a mobile app. I want to build a SaaS product. But what they miss is that building an online directory is going to get you thousands of visitors on autopilot. And once you have that, then go and vibe code a SaaS product. Then go and vibe code an app. In the beginning of this episode, we share multiple examples of people making millions of dollars a year using online directories. And some of them have apps that go with it too. So this is an incredibly important yet boring episode of the podcast.

1:42But those who stick to the end, I think are going to have an unfair advantage. I totally recommend you take this link and share it with a friend. because this is alpha that is not shared anywhere else on the planet. You're in for a treat. Enjoy this episode with Frey.

2:04It is a treat because we have Frey on the pod. By the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of it? Yeah, thanks for having me on, by the way, Greg. Like, yeah, by the end, I really want people to have a solid understanding of how to use cloud code to build AI coded directories with an emphasis on what I think is the hardest part, which is getting the valuable data. And we're going to go deep on that. But first, I think it's only fair we run it back. The last time I was on the pod, we played a game where I showed you a few cool directories and you guessed the traffic. So if you're down, I'll share three cool directories.

2:45And if you want, you can try to guess the way that these monetize as well, just because I think that'd be pretty fun. So I'll go ahead and share my screen and we can dive into it. Let's do it. I can't say no to a game. Frey, you know that. All right. So the first one is parting.com. And we can see it's a funeral home directory. this is kind of what it looks like click around and how much traffic do you think that this website makes well it does say it's the number one if you go to the if you go back to the home page i think it says the number one funeral home comparison website for price and quality um i'm going to guess it gets at least 100 000 visits a month that is a solid guess let's take a look all right all right 61 000 organic monthly visitors so pretty close and what's really cool about this directory i'll kind of share a little bit about this one is by the way any guesses on how this might monetize i'm just curious before i go into this well two things I did see some ads pop up, but I don't think that's where they're getting the bulk of the revenue.

4:08I would say it's a lead gen directory. So they sell leads to funeral homes. Yeah, that is partially it. Definitely the ads don't make up the bulk of the revenue. So this is reported due over a million dollars a year in revenue. There's some quotes that go up to five million dollars, but they even raised money. They raised$1.5 million in 2021. But the bulk of their money actually comes from a software. And if we look at Parting Pro, this is kind of their vertical SaaS that they offer for cremation arrangement software for funeral homes. um what's really like interesting about this is like this software just helps them do things like drop shipping urns like that's that's a thing and then it's kind of got an agency back end where they just help you create the website and then do online marketing basically lead generation and i think we talked about this last time but i still believe that building a directory and creating a micro sass or vertical sass is a super solid way to go about it and with cloud code it's never been easier but the agency directory combo is a potent one and i see it all the time some of the biggest directories that i know monetize this way but yeah this is what's bringing in the majority of it so um yeah that's the first one solid guess let's move on to the second one drag it over here This one's called aplaceformom.com and senior living, massive industry.

5:53What are your thoughts on this one? Is it just for moms or for dads too? What about dad? That's what I'm saying. It's messed up. It's messed up. It's for everyone, hopefully. Yeah. I would say 50 ,000 visits a month or more. Okay. And are you thinking lead generation as well? yes uh there's a huge business around legion for senior living it's it's a huge business and there's huge publicly traded REITs real estate investment trusts that you know you can see how much they spend on marketing but yeah there's a it's a big business massive space and you know care.com that's the famous one let's take a look so place for mom.com is getting 824 000 organic monthly visitors the estimates on this are wild like some some websites claim that this makes anywhere between like 100 million dollars a year 500 million dollars a year um my gut tells me like 50 million dollars a year is probably right where I feel like it's more more accurate and the way they monetize is basically purely from lead generation so they have 18 ,000 or over 18 ,000 senior living homes that are listed on their directory and they basically have all of these kind of sneaky ways to collect information and then pass them off to these senior living homes where they collect a portion of the first month's rent or like a fixed fee for every referral that they give.

7:38So just a beastly, but very simple and straightforward directory and like super classic. Like I think most people think of lead generation when people think of directories. So I love this one. It's just so well made. It's also built on WordPress, I believe. So for the WordPress users out there, this is some inspiration. So just a really cool one. And I'll leave the last one over here. The last one's going to be gasbuddy.com. It's a crowdsourced directory to give you gas prices near you. So if you type in like a random zip code, you can just find the gas prices, save some money. And it's as simple as that.

8:23So what are you thinking on this one as far as traffic?

8:30This is a big one, dude. I see right here 100 million downloads and counting. I've heard of GasBuddy. I think that this data moat is a really interesting one just as a business. I'm a co-founder of an agency called LCA and we built some really popular AI products and one that we're working on right now It's called Stretch AI, so it's grocery prices around you. It's by one of the top guys at Waze, which is also a data play. So anyways, point is, I think that if you're number one, you have the data mode, this is getting, I'm going to say three million. No, I'm going to say two million visits a month.

9:19That's a good amount. I mean, OK, yeah, but that's that's actually a really good guess. And I totally agree. I think on the surface, this looks simplistic, but everyone needs gas. I mean, pretty much everyone. But this directory is getting one point one million organic monthly visitors and they monetize in two main ways. They make a ton of money on ads. So with this amount of traffic and tier one traffic coming from the US and Canada. yeah they're probably i wouldn't be surprised if they're pulling in like on the lower end thirty thousand dollars a month just in ads uh which if we clicked around we'd start seeing but their big play is actually a debit card and so um if we go over to gas buddy plus premium they have this debit card that they partnered up with mastercard to create and it basically allows you to save money on gas.

10:15It's$10 a month or$99 a year. And so they have a ton of members here. I love this one. This is my favorite one of the list because I think crowdsourcing gas prices is so simple, but extremely difficult. So I went back to 2004. They started in 2002, but I wanted to understand how they even incentivize people to get gas prices. Cause that's like, Why would anyone want to take time out of their day? And back in 2004, all they did was create a public leaderboard, which they still have today. If we go to gas tools here, we can see all these people, Prince33 leading the pack. And they basically did giveaways.

11:02So in 2004, they gave away e-bikes. and the way that it would work is that if you updated or reported any gas prices you'd get like 150 points and then once you reach a thousand points that gives you one entry into the giveaway and they're like yeah you could get an e-bike so i thought that was super interesting it's like very simple psychology everyone loves a public leaderboard we all can't be usain bolt but if you want to be the best gas price reporter in the world then you know you can be that and And let me see if I can quickly find the Wayback Machine tab here. Yeah, so check this out. I thought this was kind of cool.

11:44So this is a snapshot from 2006. And we can see this little leaderboard here. Prince 3.3 was active back 20 years ago. Gary, Indiana. Shout out. But now, you know, consistency, persistence has gotten him to number one. And what's insane is this guy hasn't missed a day in almost like in over 5 ,800 days. Like this guy wakes up and he's passionate about gas prices, apparently. And it's just insane to see the super fans. These days, they do give you the giveaways and e-bikes anymore. They give away$100 prepaid debit cards for gas. but I just thought this was super interesting and it's actually a rare case where the directory monetization is super aligned with the reason why users are coming to this website because a place for mom.com, parting.com, they have to go and do like outbound sales to like reach out to business owners and create an offer that way but these guys just were really creative with it so I love this example and I wanted to show you these three because like all three of these directories execute this framework that I think all successful directories do which is they help people save time save money or help people make money and if you look on any one of these like listing pages here we can see like more specifically they've done a really good job with bringing price transparency as a form of data enrichment in areas where it's just really hard to get pricing information.

13:33And I think this is actually a massive opportunity for directories. It's incredibly unscalable and manual, but there's so many industries and niches where price transparency just doesn't exist. Tons of boring ones. And so for me this year, I think like data can be a moat it can be a differentiator and price transparency is a big one because it's so hard to get so that kind of leads me into what I wanted to show you guys today which is how to get valuable data and let me just switch tabs over here to what I built let's do this good segue because I'm bought in on the thesis. I agree. I think the data is the moat.

14:27I also think that you can use AI in clever ways to get the data. So I'm intrigued, Frey. I'm intrigued. Yeah, it's definitely the most boring part. And the reason, it was actually kind of hard to decide what I wanted to talk about because with Cloud Code, you're doing so many things that I wanted to go deep rather than wide. But yeah, I would say for directories, the moat is definitely data and your SEO, like if you have really strong backlinks. But yeah, like also just quickly, another reason I wanted to show you those three directories is because I think the number one question that I saw reading the comments from the last pod was how do you monetize these directories?

15:16And the answer is really unsexy, but it depends on the niche. And I don't think it has to be display ads or lead gen. It obviously can be really creative. I've seen tons of different offers created on the back end of directories. But yeah, it's super cool. So anyways, I built this directory in four days.

15:45thousand rows that I scraped for the entire country for port-a-potty suppliers. And I just wanted to start with an example where I show you what a directory might look like with high quality data and one that looks, yeah, and what one would look like with low quality data. So let's just start with this one. This is my CloudCo directory, luxury restroom trailers, boring, but awesome niche people are spending a thousand dollars two thousand dollars a day renting these out for their weddings you know there's corporate events film sets really all sorts of stuff just kind of showing you what you can create in record time and um yeah the listing looks great super super clear with the amenities and features we have some images the types of stalls that you can go and rent and then of course the lead form some service areas and I think this looks solid but let me take you a year and a half back when I didn't know Claude Code and I created this beauty this is portapottimatch.com I built this in WordPress and it still has lorem ipsum on the front page you know we got some listing pages that are looking pretty sparse and all of this is just AI generated like sentence structures all the same it's a bad directory it's ugly it's bad all these images are the same for every listing so I built this thinking like no one could reasonably trust this directory and like inbound as a lead right but to my surprise I just built this and left it up and I got like some leads coming in and this is one example here kind of blocked out the email but I actually got a bunch of leads that just inbounded this guy named Eric wanted a restroom trailer for with multiple stalls he has a film shoot so that was kind of a cool way to look at the use cases.

17:54Another film shoot guy coming in asking for a trailer for a film shoot. Martha looking for a reasonably priced port-a-potty with a sink or hand wash station. And then this is the big one. I got a lead from the New Mexico State Fair. This is the order that they wanted. And this is like$20 ,000 plus of port-a-potty slash luxury restroom trailers that they wanted. So just an insane lead. And I was surprised. So despite my really poor data curation, it kind of just showed me that there is a massive need in this space. And it's not really easy to go and compare the different port-a-potty types if you're in the market for one.

18:46And there's also like a vast amount of like use cases. But I knew that things were kind of falling through the cracks. And so if all these leads inbounded with this crappy looking directory with lorem ipsum on the front page, what would it look like if I actually built this thing out now that I know cloud code? So I vibe coded this kind of how I built this directory that outlines this seven step process on how I'm using Cloud Code and an open source GitHub repo called Crawford AI to handle any kind of data curation. So this is where I kind of just want to show people how to tackle that data side, because I've seen probably a thousand or 2000 people build directories in the last year.

19:32And 100 percent, this is where people either quit or give up. and I totally empathize. There was a point in my life where I was waking up and being like, all right, I'm gonna sit down in this chair for six hours and click on this website and just manually verify if this is a luxury restroom trailer. And it was hell, like it was awful. Terrible, terrible use of time. But as you can see from these stats, I mean, I built this in four days, like I mentioned. I probably saved over 2000 hours in what would have been manual data cleaning, manual data enrichment, also record low costs. I mean, I would have to hire a developer to like write custom Python scripts before and it's just not necessary nowadays.

20:14So I built this in under 250 bucks. A hundred dollars of that was my Cloud Code max subscription. Another hundred dollars was for the data and then fifty dollars for some Cloud API credits to do some deep cleaning, which we'll talk about in a moment. So all you really need to get started is your directory niche. Mine's luxury restroom trailers. You need cloud code and you want an understanding of what drives decision making. Like what do people actually need to make a decision around a luxury restroom trailer? And you can just achieve that by looking at Reddit forums. I think TikTok's great. Facebook groups, Instagram, anywhere where the conversation online is being had around these around the topic that you're building a directory around.

21:03So as we can see, like this whole process I'm about to go over is just the second step. For me, I think my structured approach to building directories starts with finding the idea, collecting the data, building the website, SEO optimization, and then figuring out monetization. So let's just start with the first step. The first step is just scraping the data. I just went straight to OutScraper. I don't think there's nothing new here. I went over this in the last pod, but OutScraper is still the cheapest option for me. I've used Appify and other kind of alternatives, but just keep it simple. I think OutScraper is a great place to start.

21:47And there's tons of videos online where people can learn how to scrape data with from google maps using outscraper so i went and did this i got 71 000 rows and potential listings and covered the entire state i build nationwide directories and the whole game plan is to sell leads in this high ticket niche so pretty straightforward the problem is 71 000 rows is massive and we definitely have to do a lot of cleaning as far as data goes so this is when i introduced cloud code into the mix and i used to have the manually clean data and i would have all of the obvious junk data removed so remove things like listings with no business name address city state permanently closed ones and any like obvious ones that don't relate to my niche like big box retailers and so this is the prompt that i wrote and obviously people are going to have to kind of retrofit this to your own niche but I'm just telling Cloud Code here are my five CSVs go ahead and just look at every single one and use this criteria to clean the data and so this simple prompt got me from 71k down to 20 ,000 listings.

23:09And if you are going to use this prompt, I think anyone can benefit from this particular part, which is just getting rid of obvious junk data. And yeah, what we're left with is just still a massive piece of data. So the next round is where it gets a little bit more interesting. And this was like where I had the biggest problem a couple years back, which is, okay, we have 20 ,000 potential porta potty businesses. I've kind of exhausted all of my ways to kind of superficially clean the data. And so at this point, I need a way to automate the process of manually going to every single website and verifying whether or not these are luxury restroom trailers.

23:56And so the way that I did that is I installed Crawford AI. This is an open source LLM friendly web crawler and scraper totally free which is insane and this is something that you just install locally to your computer I'm brand new to I'm brand new to AI coding like I'm only six months in and so if you're just getting started the way that I literally did it is just took this link gave it to cloud code and told it to help me install it and it took about 15 minutes so now that we have this installed crawl for ai is kind of the engine that allows us to at scale look at every single website and then cloud code is the brain so we can prompt cloud code and say look at every single one of these 20 000 websites and just go and identify the luxury restroom trailers so as a quick little demo here um oops i'll just pull up my cloud code here and i just wanted to show people the workflow instead of just talking about it but i'll just do it on a smaller sort of sample size so here's the csv of just 10 restroom trailers or sorry, here's an example of 10 porta potty companies.

25:16And basically I'm trying to figure out which ones are restroom trailers and which ones aren't. So I'm going to go ahead and just run that prompt that I showed you here. And I'll just copy and paste it here. And great. You're not very technical from what I remember. I'm not. I'm not. Like that's the funny part is like when I learned cloud code it was like even to this day I don't really think I use cloud code um to what it could be but yeah like I've still been able to accomplish like a ton and um yeah I probably should explore other other tools but I just try to keep it simple and do it well with tools like this.

26:09So yeah, I'm totally not technical, which hopefully gives any reason to anyone watching this who's less technical to learn cloud code. Because if I can do it, I can, you definitely can do it. So I use cache results. So this came back super fast, but basically I gave it 10 businesses here. We can see it identified three luxury candidates in seven standard port-a-potties, but it might take longer if you run it for the first time. and essentially I just kind of told it to go through this go through every single website and identify like restroom trailer related keywords so it's kind of helpful to know like all the synonyms of the keyword you're trying to look for and a couple pro tips if you are using crawl for ai there's extra modules that you can add including this one and this is one of a few that I used but async web crawler allows you to just crawl multiple websites concurrently that saves a ton of time but yeah this was kind of the point where I was like oh snap this is insane and I can't believe it's free because I set this up in probably 15-20 minutes I wrote this prompt by just talking to chat gbt and then it just ran in the background for three hours and this is really what would have taken me like a thousand hours just a couple years back so the result was 20 000 websites down to 725 luxury restroom trailers we can see the csv here and um yeah it even gives us like verification confidence it's just nice it's nice with it Like I saw this and I was like, this is so cool.

28:01But that's not it. And that's not really enough to build a directory. So we move on to step four. And this is when we get into trailer inventory. For me, that's trailer inventory. But for you, it's just like, for you, it's the first round of data enrichment. Like I need to figure out out of all of these 725 restroom trailers, what do they offer? like what's what like if you look online most people are looking for two stall and three stall trailers because those are good enough to cater to like a 50 to 100 person wedding but some people are looking for more and so I wrote this prompt again it's very casual you can tell that I just had a conversation with chatgbt and I just used crawl for ai in the same way but this time instead of looking for keywords like restroom trailer, I told it to look for the full like fleet of products that a business offers.

29:00And yeah, so I believe I have a prompt as well. We can actually just take this right over here just to show people. I won't do this for every single one, but just to show people kind of the workflow, I can say, let's take those three candidates for luxury restroom trailers and use this prompt. I'll just do that. And this prompt again is just telling it to go and find all the different types of luxury restroom trailers that a business offers. And I do like to add to just like get Claude Code's opinion, give me your game plan tell me if i'm missing anything and just let me know before we we go for it before we burn tokens before we burn tokens and we have to upgrade our clod um yeah so this is basically um Um, yeah, so, uh, cool.

30:10Yeah. So yeah, it basically came back with a one containers. There's a two stall trailer and a four stall trailer. Again, this is going to take more time, but you can set up whatever logic you want. And actually there's a lot of nuance with this process. So just to kind of go over that, like there's a ton of edge cases that you want to check after every single pass. And one of the first mistakes that I did when I started enriching my data with Crawford AI was I would just give it this massive laundry list of things to get and just gave it like a massive CSV. And I was like, get the trailer inventory, get the images, get any amenities, features, pricing, all of that stuff.

30:53And it just didn't work. Like it was super low quality. So that's why I'm kind of going slowly one at a time. And this is also helpful because after this pass, I could examine the results. You always find edge cases, these one-off situations where you should let Cloud Code know that it messed up, it done messed up, so that you can fix it. And you might have to rerun this. I reran this, I think, two or three times until pretty much all of my data was good and I had all of the stall information for every single listing. So yeah, this process just continues one by one. For me, the next one was trailer images and this one was cool because not only did I use Crawford AI to scrape the images from the business websites, which by the way, I know is a gray area, but I plan to go and reach out to these businesses and ask for permission and just have them claim the listing, which basically gives them, um, gives us the, uh, you know, green light to use this, but you can scrape the images.

32:04And what I did was I just told cloud code to look for any alt text file names, examine the page that it's on and scrape the highest quality images. And then what I did is I told it to create, I told it to take the top three candidates for trailer images and then I just sent it over to Claude Vision and this way it was able to look at these images and identify the best ones because the first time I did this I got like logos and crappy images and favicons and it was like am I really about to clean this image data like this sounds so bad and this is the workaround that I came up with. This cost about$30.

32:51All I had to do was go to Claude and connect my API key. Super simple. And this is the prompt that I used. I let this run overnight. But yeah, this took probably about an hour or so for 700 listings. So if we take a look, this is kind of where we're getting brick by brick. We're just starting to get all of this good information, stalls and all the green um columns here are kind of the ones that are valuable let me see if uh oh yeah yeah so all of the yeah all of the green highlighted columns are of the images and i think it did a really great job so um if we just click on any one of these they're pretty solid and this was not the case the first time so we're starting to see how this comes together just just on the uh scraping image piece you know i i'm not a lawyer don't play to be one on the internet fray not to my knowledge is a lawyer is that correct i'm not he is not uh so So I think, you know, but I think that you, if you scrape people's images, you are the only way you're, well, let me take a step back.

34:13You're supposed to have the rights for images that you post on your websites, right?

34:22So sometimes those rights are available. Like, you know, if you look at the terms of services of some websites, those are available. And sometimes these are like small local businesses. The chances are they might not even have a terms of service. So, yeah, just so you know, there is some risk associated with scraping images without the rights. Totally, yeah. And I think you don't even need images for a directory to rank and get traffic. I just kind of wanted to show this use case. And I'm sure there's ways and there's different niches where you can scrape images where it's less risky, you know, public images and such.

35:04Or you can just use like stock images. I mean, we saw from my crappy little directory, no pun intended, like this got leads without needing a ton of images on the listings. So 100 % not advocating for this and definitely some risk. So just know that going in. And I think that was a good shout out. Before we get to the next step, I just want to make a quick note about your crappy other website. I will say the logo on this website does slap. You've got this mascot and he feels very approachable and interesting. I don't know if the audience feels the same way, I am feeling a bit of a loss of a little character in the new you know fancy apple style website 100 i worked i worked hard on this little guy and um yeah i just generated it with chat gbt and i'm sure you can use nano banana for this but yeah i'm actually planning on bringing this guy over and um adding some human touch to this directory because it's definitely unfinished it's probably like 60 finished but But I appreciate that.

36:21That's a compliment to my creative side, which does exist in the world of directories, but it's just maybe less common. But yeah, like just kind of going back to this, though, like the process just kind of continues stacking. Like it did this with the amenities and features. Again, like the process wasn't smooth the first time. It would miss some amenities and features here and there. but this is the very casual prompt that I wrote. Basically just, you know, mentioned that the first time I ran this, it didn't do a good job. There was a bunch of weird words like it and and and the like, that's not a feature.

37:04That's definitely not a feature. But this pass worked really well. Once I started to kind of understand the edge cases and say, I want you to go and identify all of the best pages, go on the homepage, look for any page with restroom trailers and go deep. And I was able to create these cool amenities. And this is what it came up with. Tons of different features that would ultimately become the filter on my directory. So if we check out that page that we're checking out here, like I give people the option to choose by stall. So this is the stall data. But if we also go back and click on running water, for example, it'll just show all of the luxury restroom trailers with that specific amenity.

37:57And people can click multiple if they want and then sort from there. So that was kind of the reason I chose this one um see if there's any sort of mentions here um yeah like this one was pretty straightforward and this didn't really take too much time but again massive time saved compared to manually doing this and then the last one was also pretty simple it was just the service areas a lot of people want to know if a place can drive out like 100 miles to a remote location where they're having an outdoor wedding. So yeah, this is the prompt that I wrote and just asked it to go and find the service areas.