This week I talked to a guy named Grant.
Grant isn't an SEO. He's got a full time job, a wife, and four kids. He's never paid for Ahrefs and he's never done a single piece of keyword research in his life.
Two months into his first directory, he's made over $3,800.
I wanted to break this one down, because I think it's the most slept on way to build a directory right now, and it doesn't require you to be good at SEO at all.
He took three true things about himself and built a directory out of them
Grant is a Christian, he lives in Arizona, and he homeschools his kids.
That's the whole niche. Those three things.
Arizona has a program called ESA (empowerment scholarship award). If you pull your kid out of the public school system, the state gives you a few thousand dollars per kid to spend on education instead. Private school, co-ops, tutors, martial arts, STEM classes, horseback riding lessons.
So there's this enormous network of vendors who accept ESA money, and there was no good way to find the faith based ones.
Grant knew that because he and his wife were the ones in the Facebook groups trying to find them.
He threw a first version into Lovable and posted it in those groups. 70 people signed up for a free listing on day one. He'd nearly abandoned the thing the night before (he thought the homepage was bad).
Now he's sold 30 featured listings at $179 a year or $20 a month, plus sponsorships on his category pages.
The keyword data would've talked me out of this one
Here's what the search volume looks like.
If you'd brought me this niche a year ago I'd have told you to keep looking.
And I'd have been completely wrong, because the demand was never in the keyword. It was sitting in a Facebook group where a few hundred parents are waving money around asking who takes ESA.
Facebook groups, if leveraged sincerely, can be your solution to distribution.
Did you know every 60 seconds, there are 4000 Debbies asking her Facebook friends for a tutoring recommendation for her kids?
I made that up. But seriously.
There are thousands of real, authentic, economically-driven conversations happening that don't show up in a keyword tool.
So that's the first thing I took from talking to him, and it stung a little. The data never tells you the whole story.
There's a fourth distribution channel and I keep forgetting it exists
For a long time I've thought about distribution as three options.
- SEO. Slow, requires research and outreach skills, but the cheapest over time.
- Paid ads. Fast, and you're renting every single visitor.
- Organic social. Lot of work, requires creativity.
But there's a fourth one, and Grant's entire business runs on it. High trust communities. Mainly Facebook groups and Reddit.
It's slow too, but for a completely different reason. You can't buy your way in and there's no shortcut. You have to show up, be useful, and prove you're there to contribute a lot more than you take.
The cost is your time. The return is word of mouth, which is the most potent distribution there is and the only one nobody can outspend you on.
I get 6,800 visitors a month and I don't know a single one of them
I checked the analytics on my scratch and dent appliance directory this week for the first time in months. Still doing about 6,800 US visitors a month, completely unattended.
Great, right?
Except I have no relationship with any of those people. No trust, no influence, no reason for a single one of them to come back or tell a friend.
Grant has a fraction of that traffic and he's on the phone with the people in it. He knows their names. Some of them go to his church.
His traffic is worth more than mine and it isn't close.
I was wrong about Holistic Gynecologists
Over the past year I've had a handful of conversations with women who want to build a directory for holistic gynecologists.
I've always been the one pumping the brakes, because from an SEO angle it's rough. Individual practices dominate the results, and the intent behind a search like "holistic gynecology" is somewhat vague (it includes physiotherapy, psychology, acupuncture, diet and mindfulness.
But I think this advice was too one-dimensional.
It took me one search to find this.
That's where I'd start if this were my project. Not buried in a keyword tool.
And that's really the whole pattern, which you can run on your own life today:
- A group of people who self identify as a thing (not just people who buy a thing)
- A place they already gather, whether that's a group, a sub, a forum or a Discord
- A problem inside that group that nobody has organized yet, usually because it's too small or too weird to show up in a tool
Hit all three and you don't need tens of thousands of visitors to build something people will pay for. Grant is proof of that at 600 clicks a month.
For this to work, I'm a big believer that you need to care. Like, actually care enough to want to be there and be part of an online community.
If you're just in it for the money, I personally don't think you last long enough to reap the full benefits of a trusted reputation.
The good news is that there are communities for virtually everything. And there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of untapped directory opportunities hiding in them.
My full conversation with Grant is up on YouTube here if you want it. He gets into his Reddit playbook (start your own subreddit, seriously), what an actual sales call sounds like, and the AI assistant he built to answer questions about the ESA rules.
Now here's my selfish ask: if you or someone you know has built a directory that's successfully gotten traction and/been monetized, let me know. I love learning about new directories that are working. Would love to have you on the pod as well 🙂 Just reply to this email if that's you!
Keep Building,
Frey
