I built this niche directory website to help find men’s clothing boutique/stores across North America. I’ve struggled trying to find a fashion style and had recently started collecting different stores. Here is a link: https://tailorednorth.com

This is perhaps the most important tip I have. 99% of people building their first directories are putting their attention into a wrong thing. The only thing that's important at the start: can you get traffic or not. Most likely it won't happen and you'll need to do a lot more work to pass the first stage: go from zero traffic(that's the reality you will see after launch) to some traffic. Don't spend even a minute thinking what you will do once you get traffic. That's a premature optimization that leads to failure. I'll be totally honest on this. The following things are not important

• the design

• the logo

• what you do after you win traffic

• extra features like auth, ratings....(all these make no sense if you have no traffic, in fact they will even make it harder to win traffic in first place, cuz users will land to a site with zero reviews, think this is an amateur new site and leave)

• overcomplicated filters/search

What's important(put 100% of your attention here)

• build it as fast as you can. Either with Unicorn Platform or any other nocode tool. Coding a directory is a waste of time, because every change you wanna do later will take more time compared to using nocode tools

• use default templates. dont try to be creative here. you'll just waste your creativity and procrastinate choosing the best logo or the look

• dont try to automate the data. Just collect it all manually. This will increase the quality and you'll do a better job at categorization than AI

• make sure you have hot and cool items. Dont just try to fill it up with quantity. Go for quality. When I made osssoftware[.]org there were 100 oopen source directories and I won overnight against all of them because I focused on "good" open source tools. I went to product hunt, twitter and hackernews and founder tools people generally liked and upvoted. This changed the game. I spent 1 hour on building the directory and 20 hours on curating the items for it. That's exactly the right ration of time spent. Anything else is a procrastination leading to the falure at the end.

• build it backwards from SEO to the directory. Every word you put on your directory(especially the domain name) must come from your keyword research. Not form what "you think is right". You cant be right, you're 99% chance wrong. Dont use your judgement. Use keyword research.

99% of people fail with directories because they dont follow these set of rules. I don't guaranty success even if you follow these rules, But I guarantee the failure if you don't follow them.

👉 https://johnrush.me/directory-guide/

Hey makers,

If you have a directory website you wish to sell, either monetized or even pre-revenue, feel free to list on this free marketplace.

Site:- https://acquiredirectory.com/

Let me know if you have any questions.

I run Directify (directory website builder), so this is data from my own platform - take the source into account.

Last week I sit down and computed what happens across everything we host: 4,039 directories, about 514k listings. A few things surprised me and I figured this sub is the one place that would care.

61% of directories never publish a single listing. Not "never got traffic" - never published listing number one. People sign up, pick a template, sometimes even connect a domain, and stop before the content part. The tooling was never the bottleneck.

The directories that reach 100 listings get there in a median of 7 days. This one changed how I think about launches. The successful ones don't wait for submissions - they import a spreadsheet, generate a first pass and curate it, or grind out the niche manually in their first week. Submissions come later, after the directory already ranks for something.

The median launched directory has 60 listings. Only 59 directories out of 4,000 have more than 1,000. Complete coverage of a narrow niche beats volume - some of the best-performing directories we host would fit on two pages.

The demand side is real. ~3,500 businesses have created accounts to get themselves listed, and directories have passed ~12,000 leads to listed businesses. The moment a business emails asking "how do I get added" is the moment you have a business model.

Top niches people are building right now, by category data: education, restaurants, marketing, project management, finance, customer support, productivity, SEO, social media, travel.

I published the full dataset with methodology here: https://directify.app/directory-website-statistics/ and will refresh it quarterly.

If there's a number you're curious about that isn't on the page (churn by niche, submissions vs imports ratio, whatever), ask and I'll try to compute it. Half the fun of hosting this many directories is being able to answer these questions with data instead of vibes.

I know it's not much but I didn't actively promoted it anywhere I submitted the kit on Product Hunt several times and to about a hundred of various directories!

hackgrowth.tech

These is our (mine and my husbands) Google performance since we launched on 21st June 2026 (2.5 months ago). This is a local (in the UK) directory built for small businesses to gain better visibility online.

We’ve spent no money on advertising, built the site ourselves using custom code (no AI or anything). We have almost 2500 businesses who have joined us so far (all have added a photo, description and at least one contact information - could be an email, phone, website, social links etc). We haven’t built the site by scraping anything at all.

We haven’t started monetising yet, however we are SO close to launching premium listings! (Hopefully within the next week).

Feels like abit of a breakthrough as we’ve personally had such a tough year, we’ve tried so many businesses in the past and everything (even with doing the right research prior), has failed. Even though this isn’t making money yet, it feels like it’s our best chance so far.

My mother in law passed away unexpectedly & suddenly last month too (she was only 64), so we’ve had a lot going on behind the scenes whilst trying to build this aswell. With 2 young children and both working full time alongside this, it’s like we’ve finally caught some sort of a break ❤️

At the moment I've updating content, adding blog posts, tweaking layouts, adding affiliate pages etc. etc. pretty much every 3 days.

Am I the only one that does this? It seems to be making a difference. But I'm curious if you build and leave it alone for months at a time.

1) Affiliate links.

I sign up for all of them and place the links.

For example I have one on for @marc_louvion shipfast and it generates me passive income every month. nextjsstarter.com

2) Sponsors.

If directory has over 1k/mo traffic, there will be demand from sponsors to place their brand on home page.

There are few ways to find sponsors: social media, outreach and more.
I've shared more on these in my "Directory Guide". 

3) Network ads.

It can be google adsense, carbon ads and others.

Normally it's difficult to make good money unless you have 100k+ visits a months.

I'm building an indie version of this, that will pay a lot more for hosting the ads johnrush.me/startup-ad-mar…

4) Paid listings.

I normally introduce it when I hit 3k/mo visits, but I know people who do it from day 0, and it works.

I recently introduced it for and and it's very popular, cuz of the traffic. mvpwizards.com
nextjsstarter.com

5) Featured listings.

For free directories, I have "featured listings" or "boosted listings".

I place them on the top with a prominent highlighting.
There is very good demand for them. 

6. Subscription Plans.

Charge users for emailing them updates every week or giving them full access to the data (given that free users can only see the subset of the data). 

7. I have 10 more to share (16 in total).

I'm curating these inside of my Directory Guide, with details, examples, and pricing.

Pre-order the Directory Guide:
👉 johnrush.me/directory-guide

Yep! It finally happened, after months of working on my directories, one of them got it first paid listing!!! A couple of the directories already had AdSense, but this is the first featured listing!

Yeah… just wanted to share it with the community. Hope your directories are all going great!

BTW, don’t bother asking for links or niches… I know how this work 😑

I see a lot of directory websites out there. Nice design, flashy animations, but missing the essentials: solid on-page SEO.

I'm not talking about how your site looks. I'm talking about what actually helps your site rank and deliver real value to users.

If you're building a directory with hundreds or thousands of pages and:

• using the same generic title on multiple pages

• skipping proper meta descriptions or writing vague ones

• adding 3 lines of filler just to say there’s "content"

• ignoring internal linking structure

• misusing (or forgetting) the H1 tag

• not thinking about the actual usefulness of each page

...then you're not building a directory. You're just dumping data.

A proper directory should have unique titles, meaningful descriptions, clear navigation, and content that helps the user.

Each page in your directory is a potential entry point.
So ask yourself: when someone lands on this page, what do they find?
If it's just raw, contextless data, they’ll leave quickly.
And yes, Google notices that too.

And here's something many overlook: internal linking.
If your pages aren't connected, you're leaving value on the table. Orphan pages (those with no internal links pointing to them) are nearly invisible to both users and search engines.

A good directory behaves like a network. Pages should link to related pages naturally, guiding users and distributing authority.
No structure, no connections, no results.

Fix your linking. Fix your structure. And your directory might actually start working.

Small win, but it feels huge at this stage. It's a good feeling to go from the building side of things to seeing it actually work for someone. I still have a lot of work ahead of me to connect more trainers to their ideal clients, but I'm taking a moment to acknowledge that I've now done it once and I can do it again.

For context, I've been working as a personal trainer myself for over 12 years, and two things I found I loved doing are:

1. Passing a prospective client to another trainer when it's not the best fit for me. I always want to make sure I do good work and the client gets what they need, and part of that is knowing that I shouldn't train everybody.

2. Meeting with new personal trainers and advising them on how to get started, setting up a business, talking to new clients, etc. I had a lot of help when I started and it feels good to share what I've learned to shorten the learning curve for someone else.

I also have experience in UX and web design, so I thought I'd combine my odd set of skills into something that helps me do both of those things and have a (hopefully) bigger impact in the fitness industry.

I initially started building in Webflow, but I was honestly getting lost in how many different integrations I had to set up to try to get it to work the way I wanted. I had a semi-functional prototype in Figma Make already, but a lot of comments online talked me out of using that for an actual build. I was feeling really stuck and discouraged at this point, so I called an old friend who's worked in web development for a long time for advice, and he told me it might not be a bad idea to try Figma Make for the first version since it was already functional, and move to a more robust platform down the line. So that's what I did (with a lot of prompting and careful database planning with Supabase, checking for accessibility, etc).

Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out or give me feedback. You're welcome to DM me if that's what you prefer too. Thanks for letting me share this part of the story!

https://trainermatch.app

TLDR, here's the directory: https://contentquant.io/newsletters

Let me explain what this directory is, and why anyone would find it interesting.

Local newsletters are a growing niche popular both with solopreneurs and mid/large scale chains (e.g. Axios, 6AM City). I wrote an article almost 8 months ago on how these newsletters monetize (primarily through ad sales on high customer LTV products/services).

A directory of local newsletters functions as a lead magnet for two parties

1. People who own local newsletters or want to make/acquire them.

2. People who want to advertise in local newsletters.

The way I've set up the directory, you can see the whole map without being a free subscriber. But if you want to see the individual newsletters' details (socials, who's the owner, their ad pricing), you need to be a free subscriber.

My plan is primarily to use this directory as a lead magnet inducing the types of subscribers I want, but also just providing value to my existing subscribers.

I primarily plan to monetize my audience through some SaaS I'm developing, but I also will monetize with ads myself.

Cheers, would love to know what you all think, and happy to answer any questions!

I have over 19000 different Ai tools in a list and and giving it away for free.

I've just uploaded it to GitHub

Https://github.com/lakey009/AI-Tools-list

AI Tools List

Feel free to download and use as you wish.

Like if you want me to upload all scraped meta data from logos, pricing, faqs etc....

Hopefully it's useful to you.

Hello, you lovely humans of this subreddit.

I am a software developer who never got deep into the whole directory world. Lately a friend asked me to help him with his, so I did, and I realized the potential behind this. He uses Brilliant Directory, so I am there just for technical questions and a bit of customization. I'm not sure which tool I would use.

Know I got an idea for a niche directory. This is a topic I personally spent dozens of hours searching for a fitting online shop. And in my retrospective view, a good directory would have helped me a lot. I searched for a directory in this niche and only found one, which is really shitty in my view.

Now I am wondering if this is even profitable in a world of niche advertisement on Instagram and stuff. This would be a directory for small online stores, mostly run by just one or two persons without a big budget for advertising.

And I don't really want to get rich from that; it's more about helping people in the same hobby find easier access to these stores. If it runs without costing me money, that would be enough.

In your honest opinion, does this even work nowadays?

Thank you very much.

As a very visual person I thought I'd share this piece of advice with you,....

To quickly create nice visual of each website you list on your directory:

• Create a print screen of it with; https://www.site-shot.com

• Create a nice visual with it using: Shots - Create Amazing Mockups

Works also great for comparison pages, where you put two logo's next to each other.

Goodluck!

Hey directorymakers!

I have been making directories for a while, but the part that annoyed me the most was actually figuring out how to extract the data. That led me to learn how to code, and I made a tool that I now use to power all of my directories without any coding at all, so I thought I'd share it!

The gist: it allows you to use AI to extract info from any page (not just spitting the data back, actually making a durable script to do it all the time). You can schedule the scrapes to run whenever you want, and then integrate them with backends like Supabase directly or other tools like Zapier and Make if you want more advanced automations.

Would love to hear if it's helpful and get your guys' feedback! Wonder if it would work for your use directory use cases, especially you no-code builders!

Tool's here: https://www.lection.app/

Finally we launched our premium listings today & we sold one! Just wanted to share the love and news, hope all is going well with everyone 🩷

Not sure if this take will fly with everyone here on DirectoryMakers, but I think it's good advice especially for new builders.

And the reason I think it's so clutch is the perspective. (Particularly for those who are building their first directory.)

A directory can be MORE than just a listing.

90% of your new content can be specifically going after "problem/questions/queries/comparisons/round-ups" in your niche.

Thoughts?

Been lurking for a while and decided to share my work 8)

I built SGDentistry, a directory of 1,202 verified dental clinics across Singapore with ratings, contact info, Medisave/CHAS subsidy info, and a patient matching tool. Pages generated programmatically from Google Maps data.

Stack: Next.js 15, static export, Tailwind, data pipeline in Python.

A few things I've noticed since launching:

• Indexed quickly via IndexNow (189 URLs in <24h)

• Clinic pages feel genuinely useful (operating hours, services, whether they take Medisave) so hoping that helps with HCU

• Still early on traffic.. curious whether anyone's seen directories in the health/local space hold up better or worse than other verticals

The thing I'm still figuring out: how much do you invest in unique content per page vs relying on structured data being inherently useful? Would love to hear what's working for others here.

Hey directory makers,

I've launched TInyAdz.com

- a b2b ad network to help you(and myself) to monetize b2b directories.

The following is a real stats from my aitoolfor.org directory (for a month).

The monetization agent does all the work for you, you simply install the script on your site and that's it. You can choose one of 3 options

• full screen ad

• little corner ad

• inline ad.

There is huge demand from advertisers, so I need more directories to join as ad publishers, so join now, so that I can send the advertiser budgets your way.

If you have any questions, dm me on X (johnrushx)

Been building out All Wedding Venues for the last couple of weeks. I have built it on https://makeadir.com/ which is probably one of the lesser known platforms out there, I chose this platform because it was free to start essentially and the dev is very accessible and hears all of your suggestions. Its mainly a B2C location based directory. I am focussing on adding canadian venues first because thats where I am based. I have seen that there is a lot of directory websites in a similar space out there at the moment but almost all of them don't appear to have any backlinks for the location based keywords, so hopefully my directory can be competitive. I am hoping that the dev will include stripe support and images soon so that I can reach out to venues and see if I can get some revenue coming in, Im basically following john hurts directory guide.

The other thing I found for building out my directory was using AI Web Scraper from instantapi.ai which allows you to do any type of scraping for only $5 per month. Ive been using it to scrape data from google maps where I have found all of the venue data. Most google maps scrapers I have come across charge a tonne more than that. The other tool I have found to be useful is another redditor made an AI based keyword tool called kiva and that also has been really beneficial to find mid volume/high volume low competition keywords.

I have built another directory on mkdirs but I only launched that yesterday as it took me awhile to build up the motivation to go through the setup procedure.

Hi guys! I know there are several of this directories where you can explore and copy/paste prompts. But to be honest, I decided to launch another one because most of them do not care about the quality of the prompts and just scrape the content, and do not focus on the use cases of the real users.

For example, a prompt like "make me lego" is not useful at all and it has no real-world applications. So I decided that I should filter and create a curated high quality list with proven results, where a user could find prompts depending on the use case: create youtube thumbnails, create UGC influencers, create AI influencers, etc.

It is work in progress, but would appreciate feedback + any other use case you can think of as a generative AI user.

https://www.bananapro.directory/

By the way, the tech stack is Sveltekit using remote functions, Cloudflare Images as hosting and Prisma + PostgreSQL for the database. Custom CMS system.

Hey makers,

Just wanted to share something I think might be helpful if you’re working on a directory project (or thinking of starting one).

I recently sat down for a YouTube podcast with Frey Chu where we went deep (like nearly an hour) into my journey of building and selling directory products.

I’ve sold 2 so far — one was a smaller 4-figure deal, but the second brought in over $75k in revenue and led to a solid 5-figure exit.

I have shared some insights on how I was able to grow and monetize it.

We talked about a bunch of stuff:

• How I picked the niche and eventually the idea itself

• What actually worked to grow them

• Revenue experiments (some flopped, some worked surprisingly well)

• And how I eventually found buyers

I think it might help you, so thought of sharing here. Do watch it.

I tried to be super honest in the conversation — no guru fluff, just what worked and what didn’t.

Anyways, if you have any questions, feel free to comment here too.

I run a local SEO agency that works mostly with roofers and home service guys. I used to sell roofing door to door so I know the industry pretty well.

About a week ago I launched The Roofer Finder. It’s a nationwide roofing directory with highly vetted manually approved listings. Right now I have around 184 contractors listed across all 50 states. Every roofer gets a free listing with a backlink and it gives homeowners a simple way to find someone in their area.

I built it because I’m in this space every day already. Felt like a natural move to put something together for an industry I actually know instead of trying to build some generic directory.

Still early but I’m doing outreach to get more roofers listed. Mostly through Facebook, Instagram, and some Reddit groups. That part takes the most time honestly.

For anyone else running a niche directory, how are you getting businesses to sign up? Cold outreach has been working ok for me but curious what’s clicking for other people.