Four months ago I built a luxury porta potty directory and then completely forgot it existed.
I'm not exaggerating. I never built a single backlink to it, the on-page SEO is still half-finished, and it got 43 total clicks in the last 28 days (yes, 43).
But for some random reason I checked the inbox this week, and there were thousands of dollars worth of leads sitting in there.
One lead has a 135-person wedding in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Another lead has a wedding for 165 people.
And someone else is looking for a restroom trailer for a film shoot (I used to get those constantly on my very first porta potty directory, which I also neglected lol).
So that's the fun part.
The not-fun part is that this is exactly where most lead gen directories quietly die. Not at traffic, but at monetization.
The problem nobody warns you about
Here's the structural issue with a nationwide lead gen directory.
You can get leads. What you can't do is promise them because they usually inbound from different cities across the country.
Say I walk into a porta potty company in Philadelphia and hand them one of these wedding leads. Cool, we're friends now. Then I say "if you want more of these, it's $500 a month."
Why would they say yes?
I have no idea if I'll generate a single lead in their city next month. I'd basically be selling a subscription to a slot machine.
The alternative is selling per lead, which means tracking every one, chasing every payment, and arguing about lead quality with 40 different owners. Could I automate that? Probably. Does it get messy fast? Absolutely.
The clean version is one buyer who takes everything. Tim Stoddart had that with Sober Nation (a single company bought every rehab lead he generated).
But that's a lightning strike, not a plan.
So I went looking for directories that actually solved this and found inspiration from escaperoom.com.
Escaperoom.com is playing a different game
They don't sell leads at all. They let you book the escape room right there on the directory, and they take 10% of the booking.
Average booking is around $100, and the venue takes on zero risk because they literally only pay when they get paid.
At one point escaperoom.com was doing over 200,000 monthly visitors.
Even at a conservative 1% conversion, that's 2,000 bookings a month at $100 each.
So $200,000 in bookings, and their cut of that is $20,000/month.
And then it hit me. It's 2026. Why can't you instantly book a porta potty?
And nobody's really doing it, not just in porta potties but across a lot of these local niches.
It's not a new concept, but for a long time I looked at these types of directories and thought "that's never going to happen" or "I have no idea how to build that."
But the technical know-how isn't a problem anymore.
There's an SEO argument here too, and I think most people miss it.
I found another site in the space, everyescaperoom.com, which is just listings and isn't especially well built out. Digging into why the big one wins, I keep landing on the same thing: intent satisfaction.
When someone searches "escape rooms," they're not doing research. They want to book something more or less immediately.
A directory that lets them finish the job satisfies that intent better than one that hands them a phone number and wishes them luck.
That's why a site like this wins at SEO and at monetization. Same advantage, showing up twice.
Fun fact: escaperoom.com was started by a former IBM executive. I pulled it up on Wayback Machine and in 2016 they had six escape rooms listed. All in Australia. That was the whole site. These massive transactional directories all started ugly.
So here's my actual plan
Become the only place in the internet that lets you book luxury porta potties instantly.
Easier said than done, but it's the most defensible and profitable way that I see myself turning this into a real high-profit directory business.
Sure it's going to take months of shaking hands and digital door-to-door sales/relationship building, but that's the very thing that becomes the moat over time.
To start on this journey, I need to start making obvious tactical improvements.
Three things, in order.
1. Route every lead straight to the owner's inbox. I still get a copy (I can scrape their email easily enough). But the one they get says "this lead was sent to you by Frey at luxuryportapottyrentals.com," with a soft CTA to book a partnership call.
Over a few months, they just watch free money show up from a stranger.
That's the whole pitch.
2. Add the whisper. This is a trick from the rank and rent world. When someone calls the number, the call opens with "this lead was sent to you by Frey of Luxury Porta Potty Rentals" before it connects them. Same idea, different channel.
3. Change the offer completely. This is the part I had wrong for years.
The offer isn't "buy this lead, they're about to spend $2,000." It's:
Take this lead for free. If you want more of them, join the directory. New revenue channel, zero risk, zero cost, and you only pay when someone books through your form and puts money down. All I need is your pricing, your service area and your calendar.
Alex Hormozi calls that a grand slam offer (an offer they'd be dumb to turn down).
Once you land one, the next one gets infinitely easier, because now you have proof you generate leads. That's the real leverage.
Where this works and where it doesn't
I don't think instant booking works everywhere. Senior living, funeral homes, anything with a long consultative sales process - you're not instant-booking that.
Here's the filter I'd run before committing a year to one of these:
- The buyer wants to book now, not research for three weeks
- Supply is fragmented (hundreds of small independents, no giant that owns the category)
- Average order value is $100+, so a 10% cut is worth collecting
- The service is standardized enough to price and schedule without a site visit
Hit all four and you've got a real shot. Miss one and you're back to selling leads.
I'll be honest about the rest of it too, because there's a lot to figure out.
What happens when a customer bails last minute?
What happens when a provider goes quiet three days before the delivery date?
I'm going to need backup providers in every metro, plus something like Stripe Connect to handle the commission payouts (that part I'm not worried about).
Meanwhile, I'll still have to build the backlinks and make the site not suck.
So it's a real high-effort project.
RV Share, Boat Setter and Swimply all exist and basically do the exact same thing in their specific niche so it obviously works. It's ambitious, but totally possible.
The thing I actually took away
I've overcomplicated lead generation in my head for a long time.
I kept trying to automate the sales pipeline. Build the system, skip the phone.
And if I'm honest, all of that was just an elaborate way to avoid cold outreach.
Every transactional directory I pulled up on Wayback Machine started as a plain old directory. They weren't pretty. They weren't all that useful. The founders just talked to business owners for a really long time.
My plans here are very long-term (this isn't even my main focus right now, since the software I just launched has its own sales pipeline to figure out). But that's the direction I'm heading.
If you're running a lead gen directory, or you've actually cracked monetizing one, I'd genuinely love to hear what did it for you. Just hit reply and I'll see it :)
Best,
Frey
