I spoke to Kimi Green last week. She's the CEO of SamsList.co, the yelp for accountants.
Here are 11 lessons and reminders that I took away from a $200k/year directory builder:
- (Monetization) Sell to rich people. $200k in revenue came from selling leads to 30 high-value businesses.
- (Getting started) You don't need to be an expert (in the beginning) to build a solution for experts. Kimi originally quit her job to build a directory for run clubs.
- (Building trust) Kimi uses simple & proven trust-building methods (i.e. reviews), but does it at the highest standard. Never removes reviews. Reviews are sourced from actual customers. The question isn’t whether reviews work, it’s whether you trust the platform managing the reviews. That’s what ultimately drives trust.
- (Keyword research) Even highly competitive niches, like finance and accounting, have low-hanging fruits that are easy to rank for (i.e. CPAs for startups)
- (Have fun while building) Make something fun out of something boring. Kimi's idea for Hinge, but for CPAs, can be a fun value-add and massive differentiator
- (Getting started) Your lack of expertise can be your advantage - Kimi, Sam and Joe aren't financial professionals but it allows them to tackle problems in a unique way
- (Value of data enrichment) Create your directory with the goal to make it a part of the vetting process. Every week, people use Samslist as part of their decision-making process when researching a financial professional.
- (Lead generation) Use quizzes to your advantage to help people navigate through highly nuanced and complex niches
- (Do the unscalable) Don't try to automate everything. Kimi has spoken to 100+ accountants for 1-3 hours to vet the best accountants and financial professionals. The result is built-in trust that will compound every year.
- (Monetization) Once you earn trust & attention, small, in-demand features become easy monetization opportunities. Financial professionals have been bugging Kimi for more customizability for their listing page, so Kimi is launching pricing tiers that offer this.
- (Build for brand, not just revenue) Iterate for a better user experience, not purely for ROI or traffic metric purposes. Hinge for CPAs, short-form videos that humanize accountants - these ideas may or may not lead to more business. But it's the thing people will remember you for over your competition.
Short and sweet today.
Quick question for you…
I spent 100+ hours in the last two months consolidating everything I’ve learned over the last 3 years running directories, specifically around SEO fundamentals.
And I launched this as a course earlier this week.
It's stuff I’ve personally tested, experimented with, and used to drive over 1 million clicks in the past 16 months across my directories.
Currently, it's only available inside the Ship Your Directory Pro community.
But a few people have asked if I’d consider offering it as a standalone course for those who aren’t part of the community yet.
So I figured I’d just ask:
Would you be interested in a standalone version?
If enough people say yes, I might open it up. Just reply and let me know.
(unsolicited first impressions below, I've never asked anyone to "leave a positive review" because that's weird)
Keep building,
Frey
