What exactly is a directory website?
In the simplest terms, a directory website is a searchable collection of listings, often organized by categories, location, or specific criteria. Think Yelp for restaurants and local businesses or Angi for home services. The core value here is organization—helping users find something they need quickly, whether it’s a business, a professional service, or even something like blogs, like the project I’m currently working on where I’m building a directory of engineering blogs.
Why Build a Directory Website in 2024?
🐘 in the room: the directory space is already saturated and competing with giants like Yelp is not going to be easy or cheap (if at all possible) for a solo developer. So why bother? Because being small and hyper-focused can be an advantage.
Instead of creating a general directory for restaurants and hotels, what if you focused on putting together a directory of UI/UX designers who specialize in healthcare?
Hyper-niche directories can offer something the big players can not — laser focused content, features, and community. For example, let’s consider a modern directory website: levels.fyi. It’s a directory, in a sense, but it’s highly specialized—focused on tech job compensation by companies salaries across many companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, and more.
According to getlatka.com, which in itself is a directory 🤯, levels.fyi hit $60k revenue in 2020. I am sure the site has also grown since.
Not convinced? Let’s look at another example
If you’ve read about layoffs recently, there’s a good chance you read about the number of tech jobs lost in the past year. If you did, that number almost certainly came from one very small, very scrappy database: layoffs.fyi. (source)
I do not have any concrete numbers for layoffs.fyi, but it does seems like a successful example of a modern directory website to use as inspiration.
Where do you start with building a directory website?
Good news is that building a directory website is relatively easy. You don’t need a massive development team or fancy tech to pull one off. There are existing tools made for this purpose (for example: WordPress has directory themes). The most difficult part is going to be finding and organizing data in a way that is useful to your future visitors.
I reckon that picking an underserved and an undervalued niche is the key for success. In my case, I was unable to find good software engineering blogs. All of the lists that I’ve found were (at best) out of date or (at worst) completely abandoned.
Without a directory, it is very difficult to find small and independent blog. Hyper-search-engine-optimized websites with teams of writers are currently taking up first page of Google and small blogs stand very little chance of being discovered.
All of this leads me to the following conclusion: start by researching and picking a niche.
TL;DR
If you’re thinking about starting a directory website, my advice is: go niche. Look for gaps in the market and offer a solution that people are actively searching for but can’t easily find. Keep it simple, SEO-friendly, and user-focused, and you might just have yourself a successful side project that has the potential of growing into a full-time venture.
