This week I got to speak with Tim Stoddart, and honestly, he's likely the most successful directory bootstrapper I've ever met.
My selfish goal with our conversation was to pull out his single best piece of advice for each of the 5 steps I follow when building profitable directories:
- Finding and validating your idea
- Enriching your listing data
- Building your website directory
- Building trust and backlinks
- Monetization
Listening to our conversation a second time, I distilled Tim's main philosophy or framework for each of these steps.
His answers were simple, and that’s what made so smart.
Here’s what I took away.
Tim's stupid simple frameworks for building 6-figure directories
1. Finding the idea
The only filter Tim cares about when finding a directory niche?
"Do rich people do it?"
That’s it. No keyword spreadsheets, no keyword clusters. If wealthy people engage with this thing or spend money on it, he’s down to build around it.
2. Enriching your directory data
Do unscalable stuff.
Tim loves the unscalable, hyper-valuable tasks that no one wants to do.
No one wants to call and email local businesses for their listing data. It's too boring and requires a lot of follow-up if people don't reply.
This is something I talk about a lot too, especially with adding price transparency to your directory.
Everyone wants to know the price of things before they make a purchase, but it's not easy to find prices in many service-based industries. If you can do this, it'll make your directory sooo useful and valuable.
3. Building the directory
Use what you already and are familiar with.
Tim uses WordPress. Not because it’s faster or better in every category, but because it’s what he’s familiar with.
His team knows it. It works. You don’t need the trendiest tools if you can move fast with what you already understand.
4. Building trust and backlinks
Tim targets backlinks from colleges and local governments.
This was one of the biggest golden nuggets for me, personally. It's so freakin' smart.
With sobernation.com, he built a resource directory for students who were dropping out and struggling with addiction. Naturally, colleges wanted to link to it.
The key here is he built something worth sharing.
5. Monetization
Build relationships with media buyers (mainly for lead generation directories only).
This one pieced everything together for me when I was trying to figure out how Tim distributed his leads.
Tim built Sober Nation and didn’t waste time trying to do all the monetization himself.
He found one media buyer who bought his leads. That one relationship was the foundation of a six-figure business. Super smart stuff.
Here's what stuck with me after the call
It’s easy to overthink this game.
There are a thousand tools, frameworks, SEO tactics.
But Tim reminded me that simplicity, focus, and execution win. His approach isn’t as sophisticated as mine or others I know but it works.
Am I going to change my approach? Not really (maybe 1% different than my usual process).
I like digging deeper into keyword research. I like vetting ideas with nuance. That has worked repeatedly for me.
But the core takeaway is that you don’t have to follow the same blueprint as everyone else. You just have to commit to a blueprint and go hard with it.
Even when I asked Tim about the future of SEO and AI, we both agreed:
“Just look at the SERPs.”
If you’re still seeing location-based results ranking like they always have, why worry about what might change?
If Google hasn’t replaced those results yet, it's not worth pondering and letting yourself get paralyzed by "what if" situations.
I’m just going to keep building. And I hope you do too.
Best,
Frey
