Making $6,000 Monthly Running A Directory Website
How he turned his side project of helping others discover open source alternatives to popular proprietary software into a successful side business
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Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
Hi! My name is Piotr Kulpinski and I'm the 37-year old founder of a directory website called OpenAlternative.
It's a community-driven list of open source alternatives to popular, proprietary software. I am a software developer living in Poland. I've been building tools for directory builders on the side since 2016.
Last year, I finally decided to build one myself and quickly scraped together a website, now known as OpenAlternative.
How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
I have been collecting a list of open-source software for a while. Primarily for my own use (to learn and reuse parts of the code), but I thought it would be valuable to share it with others. I was also interested in learning more about SEO and growth, so I considered this a good project to experiment with.
I didn't want to spend too much time on it, so I decided to build it within 48 hours. With such a short timeframe, I had to be very selective about the features I wanted to include. I decided to build a simple listing without search or filtering capabilities. I started by expanding the list of open-source software.
I used a combination of Google, Reddit, and GitHub to find the most popular open-source projects. I also drew from my own knowledge and experience to identify lesser-known projects that I thought were worth including. I didn't want to include every open-source project I could find.
I wanted to maintain a high-quality list focused on the most popular, useful software and actively maintained projects. I collected about 70 projects in total.
For the backend, I opted for Airtable as a database. It's a simple, no-code solution that I've used before. It's not the most powerful database, but it's perfect for a project like this. I could easily add, edit, and delete records, and it has an embeddable form functionality that I used for user submissions.
With the data and the site structure in place, I started building the site. I used Tailwind CSS for the styling, and I was able to build the site in about 12 hours. The good thing about having multiple projects under my belt is that I can reuse a lot of code I've written before.
Building an open-source listing, it was pretty obvious that I should open-source the code as well.
To make the site more useful, I decided to include some data from GitHub. I built a scheduled Cloudflare Worker that pulls the GitHub API data to fetch the number of stars, forks, and issues for each project.
I also pulled some related tags from each repo, such as what programming language it's written in and what it's related to (e.g., CMS, CRM, etc.). I then put this data into Airtable and used it to generate lots of pages for programmatic SEO.
The site launched in February 2024, but no one really heard about it until March 2024.
How did you get your first initial customers?
If you've ever built a directory website, you know that it can be a great way to showcase a collection of resources, products, or services.
However, monetizing a directory website can be a bit of a challenge. I've experienced this firsthand.
I quickly realized that earning money with OpenAlternative was going to be challenging.
Once I saw the traffic I was getting from the launch, I quickly added a tiny banner to the site allowing people to pay $99/month for a premium listing.
Even though I was getting a lot of pushback in the comments on Reddit and Hacker News, I managed to get my first sale very quickly (on launch day).
After that, I took the offer down and didn't monetize the site for a few months until I came up with a sustainable monetization solution.
Since then, I've managed to come up with several ways to earn money from the site: advertisements, expedited + featured listings, and affiliate links.
From all of those sources combined, the site makes around $5,000 per month.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
Given that it's a tech-related project, what has worked best for me is posting consistently on developer-related websites like Reddit or Hacker News.
You have to be very careful not to get banned quickly there, so always try to provide value to readers and avoid being too spammy. SEO is starting to bring more and more visitors to the site, but it took a little longer than I expected.
I started to see significant traffic from search only after a year since launching. With SEO growing, LLMs also started to cite OpenAlternative in their results, which is also a promising channel with growing traffic.
How does your business make money?
OpenAlternative is making money mostly from banner ads and premium listings. We also sell an option to expedite the submission process for new tools.
The featured listing currently costs $197/mo and the expedited listing option is available for $97 one-time fee.
A small percentage of the revenue is also earned through affiliate commissions - a channel that's very new to me but I'm slowly getting better at it. I'm currently experimenting with some innovative ideas to monetize, like calculating the ad price based on the popularity of a specific subpage.
Last month, OpenAlternative made $6,000 from all of the sources, $3,500 of it being monthly recurring revenue from ads and featured listings.
The costs are currently very low. Running at ~$50-100 per month.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your business?
If you want to learn more about me and my work, feel free to visit https://kulpinski.pl and follow me on X/Twitter.