Almost two years ago, I quit my job and spent $1,500 building a plasma donation directory called discoverplasma.com.
It was the first directory I built after leaving my job in March 2024. And honestly, it was brutal.
I was living in a tiny ADU in Northern California, feeling the financial pressure of needing to make money quickly, and I just poured everything I had into this project for about two months before launching it in May 2024.
In the beginning, I had so much hope for this niche. I thought it was a grand slam.
Spoiler: it wasn't.
Not because it wasn't getting traffic - I had thousands of people coming to my site within the first few months.
It was the monetization challenges I ran into after I got traffic that led to multiple failed attempts at making anything significant.
So let's break down the numbers.
Here's how much this directory cost to build, where that money went to and how much revenue it's earned.
Then I'll talk about why, after not touching this directory for over a year, I'm still excited to invest more time and money into this directory going forward.
- Paid Partnership -
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What I spent to build Discoverplasma.com
- $1,200 on Upwork hiring a dev to automate building 200+ static location pages in WordPress.
p.s. What's funny is nowadays you could do this in about 15-30 minutes with a $17/mo Claude Code subscription. But back then I didn't have the technical skill, and I was so mentally drained from the project that I just wanted to pay someone to handle it. Totally unnecessary cost looking back today.
- ~$100 on the domain, shared hosting, and data scraping from Outscraper
- $250 on a GeoDirectory subscription (two years)
What I earned from Discoverplasma.com
- $500 from a one-off partnership from a guy who paid me $100/day for 5 days to place a lead magnet on my site. He was giving away referral codes for plasma companies and earning $50 to $100 per donation. Told me he needed to "pay for his truck" so it was a short-lived partnership.
- $1,521.60 in display ad revenue through Mediavine Journey (started in January 2025)
So net profit: about $471.
In other words, I barely outperformed what I would have made putting that same $1,500 into VOO.
While this isn't a complete "failure", it's definitely a disappointing amount for how much time has passed.
At the same time, it's hard to expect anything more knowing that I built this website and left it untouched for almost a year and a half.
Why Monetizing this Niche was so Hard
I actually got traffic pretty fast. By June 2024 I was hitting about 1,000 monthly visitors, and it grew to around 6,000 to 7,000 organic visitors pretty quickly after that.
But turning that traffic into real money? That's where things fell apart.
My original plan was to sell leads to plasma companies.
But selling leads to plasma companies didn't work because these centers already have two to three hour wait times. They don't need more leads. They can't even handle the demand they already have.
To add onto this, getting in touch with the decision maker at a 1000 employee plasma company proved to be...harder than I thought.
Then, I tried pivoting to a newsletter where I collected crowdsourced pricing data from donors about what their local centers were paying. I built a lead magnet around it and got over 1,800 organic email subscribers.
Looking back, this is the smartest thing I did because people still subscribe to that email list every day today, but I never really committed to it and eventually abandoned the idea.
So I just signed up for Mediavine Journey and ran display ads. It worked, but as you can see, the revenue was never significant.
Why I'm suddenly reinvesting more time, money and energy to rebuild Discoverplasma.com
Even though from a pure money standpoint it's disappointing, I don't think it was a mistake to build this.
It's cliche, but the lessons I learned from this project made me a better builder.
Recently, I've been inspired by directories like gasbuddy.com, which reminded me that millions of people still donate plasma each year and they're all looking for the centers who payout the highest.
If I can leverage the few thousand people still visiting discoverplasma.com every month, and create the only place to get transparent plasma donation rates on the internet, then that data could be meaningfully valuable.
At first, I thought this was a lead generation and SEO play.
Now I've realized that this is a word-of-mouth and data curation play.
That's all I'll share for now until I actually bring this next iteration to life.
But that's the beauty of directories. You can leave them, they can still get traffic, and you can come back whenever you have a new idea or experiment to test. That's exactly what I am doing here.
Cheers,
Frey
