u/DavidCBlack

Hey everyone. Long time lurker, first time posting about this.

Over the past year I've been building and running local service directories - mobile detailing, HVAC, wildlife control, a few others. All from one Python Flask codebase that I keep improving, reusing and updating

The setup is pretty simple. I pick a niche, clone the repo, change the categories and colors in the admin panel, scrape a bunch of businesses from Google Places API, and then upscale with AI and deploy using tools all inside the directory app.

Each site costs me about $5/month to host on PythonAnywhere (although thinking to move to a VPS).

Revenue comes from a few places:

\- Businesses pay monthly to receive customer leads in their city (I cap it at 3 per city so there's actual scarcity)

\- Leads that don't have subscribed providers get sent as cold outreach to companies in that city and category. This is remarkably effective and usually ends up with a chatting to the business owners.

\- Featured listing spots on the homepage and city pages

\- Site wide advertising

\- AdSense fills in the gaps

The lead system is the main earner. A customer fills out a free quote request, and the businesses subscribed to that city get notified instantly. More cities = more revenue channels. It scales itself once you've got listings in there.

I've been asked a few times if I'd sell the template so I finally packaged it up. It's on Gumroad now - full source code, admin panel, Stripe integration, email marketing, the whole thing. You can see what the end result looks like at mobiledetailing.io

Not going to pretend this is some passive income magic. You still need to pick a good niche, populate it with businesses, and do some basic SEO. But the technical side is done, you're not building a directory from scratch, you're configuring one that already works. The app is setup to create long tail specific landing pages like "bat removal in tampa florida". Every city and category gets pages and URL generated and on average about 25,000 pages indexed in Search Console.

Happy to answer questions about running directory sites or the tech behind it. Been doing this for a while now and learned a lot of what works and what doesn't.

You can see the boilerplate at directorylab.io

(P.s I'm reposting this as I added a link to the other post and it got deleted)

Hey everyone. Long time lurker, first time posting about this.

Over the past year I've been building and running local service directories - mobile detailing, HVAC, wildlife control, a few others. All from one Python Flask codebase that I keep improving, reusing and updating

The setup is pretty simple. I pick a niche, clone the repo, change the categories and colors in the admin panel, scrape a bunch of businesses from Google Places API, and then upscale with AI and deploy using tools all inside the directory app.

Each site costs me about $5/month to host on PythonAnywhere (although thinking to move to a VPS).

Revenue comes from a few places:

- Businesses pay monthly to receive customer leads in their city (I cap it at 3 per city so there's actual scarcity)

- Leads that don't have subscribed providers get sent as cold outreach to companies in that city and category. This is remarkably effective and usually ends up with a chatting to the business owners.

- Featured listing spots on the homepage and city pages

- Site wide advertising

- AdSense fills in the gaps

The lead system is the main earner. A customer fills out a free quote request, and the businesses subscribed to that city get notified instantly. More cities = more revenue channels. It scales itself once you've got listings in there.

I've been asked a few times if I'd sell the template so I finally packaged it up. It's on Gumroad now - full source code, admin panel, Stripe integration, email marketing, the whole thing. You can see what the end result looks like at mobiledetailing.io

Not going to pretend this is some passive income magic. You still need to pick a good niche, populate it with businesses, and do some basic SEO. But the technical side is done, you're not building a directory from scratch, you're configuring one that already works. The app is setup to create long tail specific landing pages like "bat removal in tampa florida". Every city and category gets pages and URL generated and on average about 25,000 pages indexed in Search Console.

Happy to answer questions about running directory sites or the tech behind it. Been doing this for a while now and learned a lot of what works and what doesn't.

You can see the boilerplate at directorylab.io

(P.s I'm reposting this as I added a link to the other post and it got deleted)

Hey everyone. Long time lurker, first time posting about this.

Over the past year I've been building and running local service directories - mobile detailing, HVAC, wildlife control, a few others. All from one Python Flask codebase that I keep improving, reusing and updating

The setup is pretty simple. I pick a niche, clone the repo, change the categories and colors in the admin panel, scrape a bunch of businesses from Google Places, upscale with AI and deploy using tools all inside the directory app.

Each site costs me about $5/month to host on PythonAnywhere (although thinking to move to a VPS).

Revenue comes from a few places:

- Businesses pay monthly to receive customer leads in their city (I cap it at 3 per city so there's actual scarcity)

- Leads that don't have subscribed providers get sent as cold outreach to companies in that city and category

- Featured listing spots on the homepage and city pages

- Site wide advertising

- AdSense fills in the gaps

The lead system is the main earner. A customer fills out a free quote request, and the businesses subscribed to that city get notified instantly. More cities = more revenue channels. It scales itself once you've got listings in there.

I've been asked a few times if I'd sell the template so I finally packaged it up. It's on Gumroad now - full source code, admin panel, Stripe integration, email marketing, the whole thing. You can see what the end result looks like at mobiledetailing.io.

Not going to pretend this is some passive income magic. You still need to pick a good niche, populate it with businesses, and do some basic SEO. But the technical side is done, you're not building a directory from scratch, you're configuring one that already works.

Happy to answer questions about running directory sites or the tech behind it. Been doing this for a while now and learned a lot of what works and what doesn't.

You can see the link to both the live sites and the boilerplate in my profile.