I recently spoke with someone in my Ship Your Directory Pro community who has been playing around with a couple of directory ideas for the past few months.
She admitted that she's been having a hard time actually starting to build.
After talking to her, I realized the things holding her back were the same thoughts I had when I first started.
Questions like, “What if I spend all this time and it’s not successful?” or “What if this niche never gets any traffic?” or “What if only three people a month ever visit this directory?”
When I built my very first directory back in 2022, I didn’t know any SEO.
I had only learned some basics from random blog posts and YouTube videos. I built the entire site manually, day after day, for an entire month.
It was slow and exhausting, and while I was doing it, I kept asking myself, “Why am I doing this? Will this even work? Am I applying these SEO principles correctly?”
Those doubts were constant, and honestly, they almost made me quit every day because the work felt like a waste of time.
Because it’s easy to convince yourself that maybe it isn’t worth it, especially when you have a strong desire for your first project to succeed.
In hindsight, it was just a really boring and inefficient way to do necessary work.
The two things that kept me going in 2022 (When I didn't know sh*t)
The first was simple curiosity.
If we zoom out and think of what SEO is, you're literally placing words and images on a website in a way that makes it easy for complete strangers to find you.
And the result is people from all over the world visiting the thing you created, just by typing something into Google.
That felt magical to me, almost like creating something from nothing.
The second was my need to figure out if passive income was real.
For context, I was so traumatized and burned out by my first business (an online footwear company where I held physical inventory) that literally any other business sounded like a less stressful thing to do.
P.S. This may be TMI, but I literally got chronic digestive issues because of the level of stress I felt. Still dealing with those today despite living a dramatically less stressed day-to-day.
I had tried so many different businesses before this.
Reselling and flipping, ecommerce, marketing agencies...they all made money, but they weren’t truly passive.
To me, being rich wasn’t about how much revenue I brought in. It was about whether my passive income exceeded my expenses.
If I could make $50,000 a year passively and only spent $45,000 a year, I would consider myself rich.
If I wanted passive income, the alternative to building a directory was either building a SaaS, saving up $1,000,000 to live off investment returns (with a 5% withdrawal rate) or buying a boring semi-passive business like vending machines or laundromats.
None of these felt as accessible or scalable as building a directory.
So when you run into those moments of doubt, take a step back and define what success actually looks like for you.
Why are you building a directory? What would it mean for you if you succeeded?
Having that clarity will keep you going when things feel difficult or uncertain.
If you're stuck, do this for 15 mins/day to find your directory niche
I want to leave you with something simple and tactical you can do if you’re stuck.
For just 15 minutes a day, work on finding your niche.
Use the prompt I shared in my recent YouTube video to come up with new directory ideas.
Search them on Google using this format: (your niche) + directory. Look for an existing directory in that niche.
Then, use a starter plan on Ahrefs for $29 a month to quickly check if the site is getting real traffic. It only takes two or three minutes per niche.
If you do this consistently and review five new ideas every day, you’ll eventually build a list of directories you’re confident in.
From that list, you’ll be able to choose a niche where you know there’s proven demand and a path to success.
I love the cliche stuff because it's true, but keep going, even when you feel stuck or unsure.
Every day you chip away at this process, you get closer to building a directory that works.
