Chris Koerner interviews Frey, who built a thrift store directory after closing his shoe business. It earned $1,200 its first ad month, peaked near $3,000 a month, and needs about 30 minutes of upkeep every few months. The episode covers how to find, build, and rank niche directories.
Frey vets ideas by finding a low-authority competitor (DR under 25) with real traffic. He builds with Claude Code and free tools, and his failure rate is about 30%. One $50 link swap put his first site on page one. His backlink email gets roughly a 7% response rate, with offers of $50 to $100. He shows examples like Entity Search, with 42,000 monthly visitors in three months.