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Category: Business Ideas
Tags: AIbusinessdirectoriesmonetizationniches
Entities: Jason McDonaldParting ProParting.comRetreat GuruSeek Experts
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So, I was looking at AI resistant profitable directories that I think are kind of hidden in plain sight, and I think I found some of the most unique directories I've ever found. All three of these directories are doing over a million dollars in revenue a year.
These three directories are all in different spaces that I think are going to be very
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resistant to AI, and that was kind of the theme that I tried to look for. One of them is in the legal space, one of them is in the funeral and death space, and the last one is in the in real life meetup and events space.
And I think these three spaces are more protected from AI because they're either belonging
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to an infrastructure thing, right? Societal compliance laws, that kind of stuff.
Or they're clearly going along with an uptrend or a future trend that we all know is going to happen like the demand for in real life events increasing exponentially. So for that reason, I think this is a pretty good
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way to get some inspiration. And this is where I'd be looking if I were to build a more AI resistant directory these days.
By the way, if you want to be kept up to date with my personal directory projects, including the comic book store directory that I just recently launched and ones that I plan to build in the future, feel free to join my shipper
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directory newsletter that goes out every single Sunday. I'll leave a link for that in the description below.
With that, let's go ahead and dive into our first profitable directory. So, I'm going to start with the most interesting one in my opinion, which is seek expperts.com.
And this is a directory that lawyers and
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legal people use to find expert witnesses. And I didn't really know what that meant, so I looked it up.
And it's basically when law firms hire experts to understand complex issues, strengthen their arguments, and improve case outcomes. Why is this so interesting?
I just think the nature of legal, finance,
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healthcare, these large niches are going to be harder to disrupt in terms of AI versus a niche like photography or something, right? Because of the regulations and the laws, the way that the infrastructure is set up.
So, if we take a look at the analytics for this directory here, it has 11,000 monthly
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visitors, which isn't a whole ton, but I think you don't need a lot to make a massive amount of revenue for a niche like this. They have a good amount of backlinks, which I'm sure are very difficult to get in this niche.
And we do see a growing traffic chart right here. I mean, if we look at the alltime, it looks like they've been around since
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right around 2017. That isn't really that old.
They do say they've been around since 1999, but maybe they have other websites and they're still kind of involved in this industry. A lot of US-based traffic here.
So, the thing that caught my eye with this directory is I was looking at the organic keywords
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that they were ranking for and I was scrolling down and I saw SEO expert witness and I was like, "Wait a second. I've never heard of that in my entire life.
I didn't even know that was a thing." So, I started to look into it and we see this directory for SEO expert witnesses. And this guy, Jason McDonald,
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for example, he is an SEO. What's different is that Jason is using his SEO knowledge in a legal context.
It sounds like Jason's job is basically to explain digital marketing to a judge in cases like trademark disputes, false advertising with social media or advertising. And that's really
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different. I wouldn't be surprised if this guy got paid a lot of money.
So, this is one of many industries that seek expert witness directory covers. They have all of these different specialty areas.
Surprisingly, SEO expert witness gets 600 monthly searches and it's a pretty low competition keyword with a
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$16 cost per click. And when we go back to the actual directory here, here it says that experts are commonly compensated at $300 to $1,000 an hour.
So, people like Jason are definitely charging a pretty penny for their services. And the business model here is
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pretty straightforward. They do say there's no referral fees or middleman.
So, if you are a law firm looking for an expert witness, then you would just go on this directory and you would hire people like Jason, which means the actual expert witness probably pays some kind of subscription fee just to be listed on this directory. Now, speaking
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of monetization, this is actually a pretty interesting website as a whole because they do have a directory here, but they also have programs, online courses, a directory of independent medical examiners. And if you click on one of these programs here, they do sell this program that's happening on
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September 11th to 12th. and it's $1,400.
But let's go ahead and explore this directory. I'm just going to go ahead and look at accounting for example and just go to California and see what happens.
We have featured experts here. So, they definitely paid for a premium
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visible spot. And the directory is really straightforward and it works like any other profile-based directory here.
But I'm curious to see how much are these people paying to get listed. So, this is pretty interesting.
Here it says, "What kind of hourly rates do expert witnesses typically charge?" And
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basically the TLDDR here is that it depends on how much the case is worth. For example, here it says a high stakes litigation might be litigating a case which involves $100 million in which case the expert can charge $10 to $50,000 because you can help them win the case.
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They have this call to action where they say if you're interested in becoming an expert witness then you can buy their course which is the $1,400 course that they have. Let's see.
Here's a Reddit post here. Seek expert witness course.
Is it worthwhile? So this person a year ago said that seek is absolutely worth it.
They took multiple classes. They
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mentioned that a single case will pay off the fee and that they are a neurologist. So this is a neurologist with a side hustle.
So clearly they're making sales with their $1,400 courses and their other expensive courses on their website. Okay, we found it.
We have seek expert witness directory listing $655.
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It looks like it's a onetime payment both online and print exposure. No middleman yada yada.
To join the directory, please click this page. And it's extremely thorough.
All of those people that we saw, all 19 of those accountant expert witnesses in California paid $655, which is pretty
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insane. So, just doing some quick math, they have over $2,000 expert witnesses on their directory.
They charge $655. Maybe it didn't cost that the whole time, but let's just assume that they did.
That would be a little bit over $1.3 million in revenue. And it's not like it costs that much to put someone
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on a listing. It's actually probably free.
So, that's pretty insane. So, they have the listing revenue.
They have featured listings, which I'm not sure how much they paid. And then they have the actual courses and programs that people go and buy, which apparently work.
There are no publicly available statements here, but one person said
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that it might be making around $3.1 million a year, which I think makes a lot of sense based on the quick math that we made. But now, let's take a look at some of the numbers.
Let's take a look at the organic keywords again to see if there are any opportunities to make a competing directory here. We do have a lot of green here which has more
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search volume than I thought. We have expert witness services at 1,300 monthly searches.
They're rank at the bottom of the first page. Here we have the SEO expert witness digital forensics expert witness that gets a,000 monthly searches at a keyword difficulty zero.
I mean some of these are like $10 cost per
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click. Social media expert witness.
And we really have expert witnesses for all sorts of industries. Construction, neurology, aviation, software witness.
So the list just keeps going on and I am kind of shocked at how low competition all of these are. We don't see a lot of
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search volume for some of these keywords especially because some of them are really niche like property management expert witness 80 monthly searches but imagine even 10% of the people searching up this keyword are law firms looking for expert witnesses then this could be a pretty lucrative directory idea to
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compete with. So looking at their top pages, we have the homepage at the top and then we have life care planning expert witnesses with 270 monthly visitors.
A lot of premium placements here and we have quite a few listings right here. Look.
Oh my gosh, look at this page. This page is probably got
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hundreds of these people, which means this page alone probably made them like hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm going to see if we can find out how much these people paid for these premium listings.
This is the only page that talks about it and it doesn't give us a straight price, but it is right here featured expert listings and it says to
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contact this person for pricing and availability. So, going back to the top pages, we do have a couple more top pages around different niches.
Like this one's in economics expert, but we also have an actual member profile and it's for Sher Jordan. I wonder if this person just gets a ton of business because 156
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people are coming to her page every single month. So, let's take a look at their back links here.
They have 10,900 backlinks. Their first backlink is from seek.com.
And I didn't even realize, but we were looking at seek expperts.com. So, this must be kind of the original
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website. Here we have nonclinical careers.
This definitely looks like a website owned by Seek. So, they definitely did something pretty smart here that we haven't seen ever in one of these episodes, which is they basically own all of these referring domains that gave them backlinks.
Testifying.com. If
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you click on this, there's the Seek logo right here. It doesn't get a lot of traffic.
It's a DR29 and only gets 246 monthly visitors, but that is a niche relevant backlink that is going to seek expperts.com. And I'm sure if we look at all of the different websites, they all
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are boosting each other up in a way, which is definitely a strategy. Super interesting niche.
One of the most unique directories that I've ever seen. Not because of the complexity of the actual directory, but because it opened this entire world of side hustles that I never even knew existed.
and it's really
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lucrative. I think that there is probably some innovation that could happen around the monetization of a directory like this.
For example, what if a law firm instead of going and manually finding these expert witnesses just placed out a bid and then people can apply to be the expert witness for
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that case? And in turn, you might be able to charge those law firms for that service and charge a lot more than just $655 for someone to have a lifetime listing or yearly listing on your directory.
I feel like that would make a little bit more sense. Next, we have parting.com, which is Next, we have
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Parting.com, which is a directory where you can compare local funeral homes. This directory is getting 39,000 monthly visitors, down 11K.
It has a sharp decline from March of 2025, which was a core update. I believe they were all the way at 143,000 monthly visitors, and
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they have really tanked to uh yeah, jeez, almost 100,000 visitors lost from that. It looks like this website was maybe started around 10 years ago, around June 2015, and they had a really slow like four years, five years, and then after 2020, they skyrocketed, which
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is kind of sad if you think about it. 100% US traffic, 57,000 organic keywords that they're ranking for, 24,00 links.
But let's take a look at the actual directory first. I'm just going to go ahead and play with this here.
Look up a normal LA zip code. Okay, so the search
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bar does not work. So, they want us to fill out the survey and that's why it's not working.
So, that's kind of a bad user experience. They do have a podcast as well as a software, but let me just take a look at their actual directory first.
So, let's go check out Atlanta. I mean, this is a very clean directory.
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And this is a premium listing right here. So, they probably paid to be at the very top.
And we have Google Ads. That's another monetization method right there.
And one thing I think that makes this directory so interesting is that they actually have the total estimated cost. And that is the type of
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transparency that I think a lot of directories should go and do. And I read somewhere in the FAQ section right here, prices on our website were obtained via calling, email, facts, and the funeral homes general price list, which is very, very hard to do at scale, right?
It's a
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lot of time, but it offers so much value. And I think this can be replicated for home services, landscaping niches, healthcare niches, all sorts of niches where price transparency is basically non-existent.
So if you can go and do the unscalable thing, I mean, this adds so much value
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and so much trust for this directory and then they just have basic information. There's really not that much of a difference than your standard directory except this.
So all of these listings seem to have this price breakdown and ultimately I think this helps a lot of people make decisions when it comes to
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which one to choose. All right, now let's take a look at their podcast.
Here they have the Direct Cremation podcast. This has 10 reviews, so not a whole ton.
It looks like they do a post maybe every month or so. How to successfully operate a cremation and traditional brand.
So, this podcast is really specific and
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targeting business owners who run funeral homes. And that's what drives them to their directory.
They also have Parting Pro, the number one funeral home software. It's an all-in-one business solution, the number one cremation arrangement software for funeral homes.
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They also have online marketing websites, drop shipping. I love it when a directory acts as top ofunnel for a SAS because I think that's an underutilized strategy.
A quick search says that parting pro software starts at $469 a month. There is no free version
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available. So already for monetization they have the software, we have the Google ads and then we have the premium listings.
And I tried to find to see how much the premium listings would cost and I found this FAQ section here. And it does say that I can visit this page to find out more but this is just an error
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page. Now, this is pretty interesting.
They say that they are a small team working out of Los Angeles that is funded by investors not affiliated with the funeral home industry. I feel like if investors who probably have a lot of resources to verify if this niche is growing year-over-year or not, uh then
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that could be a good niche to go and build a directory in or just hop on a niche that's just going to continue to grow. So, I tried to do some more digging with the monetization and the featured listings, and I found here that parting.com states that they work with funeral homes who agree to give them an average 15% cut of sales made through
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the site. That's what I would do if I had a directory like this.
We saw the prices. It's like $5,000 to $15,000 for a cremation service, which means they're probably taking somewhere around $700 to $2,000 for every transaction that happens through this directory.
Now, I
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don't know if that's the cost to get a featured listing, like instead of paying money upfront, they just agree to these terms, or if it's just for every single listing in general. Either way, this directory probably makes bank.
As expected, very difficult to find the annual revenue. It just says that in 2017, the company aimed to break a
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million dollars in revenue, and they did achieve this by their business model of taking 15% commission. So, who knows how much they're making now.
I would assume probably 5 to10 million uh if I had to guess. 39,000 monthly organic visitors.
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We're all going to be dead one day. So, this is a great niche.
It is what it is. Now, let's take a look at some of the keywords here.
They have 57,000 keywords. A lot of individual funeral homes that get a lot of search volume here.
1,00400 1,00200 3500. I mean, these are
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basically zero keyword difficulty keywords where they're ranking on the first page. So, if someone is looking for more information, maybe the funeral home isn't transparent with their pricing, but the directory is, all of a sudden, it makes a lot more sense for someone to visit your directory instead.
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I feel like I want to make a directory in this niche. Probably really competitive as well.
But I would assume that with so many funeral homes around the country, there may be a play here. You would probably have to go and do the pricing thing though, which is very, very timeconuming.
But maybe there is still a way to compete. Um, let's take a
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look at their top pages here. 15,880 pages.
That's a massive, massive directory. I mean, at this point, you would probably need a full-time team just to call all of these uh funeral homes to get that pricing detail.
All of them going to the individual listing
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page, which makes sense because a lot of those keywords were just individual uh local businesses. I mean, we can just tell from the URLs, right?
So, not a lot of location pages, more so individual pages. They don't have a lot of backlinks here.
only 2400 back links for a site that's been around for 10 years
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or more. Now, with that said, I can already tell that some of these backlinks are really, really nice backlinks.
So, maybe they don't have that many backlinks, but they're full of really high quality niche relevant ones. In which case, that's a lot.
Capital One, I mean, this is an insane backlink.
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That's really impressive. Funeral flowers.
Okay, flower shops. That that could be a play there.
Another sign that they actually do have a lot of really solid backlinks here is just look at the ratio between the referring domains and the back links. Usually we see something like a thousand referring domains and then you'll see 800,000 backlinks and
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that kind of tells you that they either have a lot of spam links or lowquality links. In this case, this is a really impressive ratio.
So, who knows how much this directory makes, but I can say that this is an incredible niche to be in. It's also an area where will AI really have a major disruption in this niche?
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Will people just go to ChachiBT and type in best funeral homes and then just call it a day and book their service? I don't think so.
Right. It involves loved ones.
It's a very vulnerable process for a lot of people. So, people are going to want to go and do their research, not just from a price perspective cuz it was
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super expensive, but from a care perspective, right? Are people actually going to take care of your cremation service the way that you want?
So, the third directory today is retreat.guru and it is a directory for finding and booking your perfect retreat. There's all sorts of events here as we can see.
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There's mushroom sessions, psilocybin retreats, post ceremony stress disorder therapy. I think in general any kind of event where it's in real life that is actually something that people want to go to is a great place to be paying attention to for the coming years.
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Meetup.com, those types of directories are going to be pretty resilient to AI just because we want to go outside. There's an increasing amount of people who are tired of just being inside or online all the time.
And I've seen it in LA here. There's really cool in-person events that happen every week that are
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exploding with popularity. Even like chess clubs, ma jang nights.
I feel like every time I meet someone new in LA, they've either heard or attended one of those two events. So, it's been explosive in terms of growth and there's like hundreds of people there.
But my point is there's this entire category of
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IRL meetups where that niche is going to be big. In the case of Retreat Guru, I mean, who wouldn't want to meet up with a bunch of strangers and do some shrooms?
I mean, it just seems obvious. Now, check out all of the locations that Retreat Guru is in.
This is a global directory. Looking at some of the analytics, this is getting 41,000
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monthly visitors. It's ranking for 23,000 keywords and it has 74,000 backlinks, a good amount of AI citations as well.
And look at this growth. This is really, really steady growth.
Been around for over 10 years, as we can see. Doesn't let me go any further than this.
But yeah, completely aligns with the
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uptrend of people wanting more interactive in real life events. Uh, but let's take a look at the actual website first.
I'm just going to go to plant medicine and we do have a best seller icon right here. I wonder if they monetize by taking a fee from the actual booking.
There's a ton of data
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enrichment right here. Marketplace commission fee.
So, retreat guru gets a 14% commission on the total price of the retreat and that is how they monetize. Here we have a retreat management system.
I wonder if that is okay. So, it is a software and it's built for retreat
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leaders. The only tool you need to run your retreat.
They've had over 750 million in payments processed for retreat leaders. So yeah, we're looking at a big directory here.
So I believe I found the pricing for their software here. It looks like they take 1.2% of
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the booking amount. So it looks like the more that you can book through them, the lower the amount they take for commissions.
That's exactly how I would want to price my software, too. Honestly, this is just an insane directory.
and the data enrichment behind this uh the marketplace aspect
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where they collect the commission fees. It's really smart.
Let's take a look at some of their keywords. Of course, they have a branded tag here and they are ranking for Iawaska retreat.
Rank one, page one for a lot of these Iaska retreat keywords for different countries. In fact, a lot of their keywords in general are just really high
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on the front page. But yeah, just looking at this dominance, I so far would not want to compete with them.
Looking at their top pages, they have 11,358 pages. So, their most traffic page is the Iawaska retreats and a bunch of different IAS and psilocybin related
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retreats, the location pages, as we can tell by the URL. So, I guess if you were to go and compete with these guys, then that's what you would want to do.
Definitely optimize that location page rather than the actual individual listing pages. We'll take a quick look at their back links here.
A lot of these
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backlinks are the actual websites for the retreats themselves, which makes sense because I would assume when you have a directory like this, a directory marketplace where your listing is not only so enriched and has all the information here, but acts as a booking platform where the actual retreat
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website owner doesn't have to worry about that feature, then of course you'd want to give it a backlink because they basically solve multiple issues because at that point they're basically giving you the marketing in addition to the way to capture your payments. No idea how much they make.
We can try to give it a quick look here. It says Retreat Guru
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generates $3 million in revenue a year. I feel like that's lower than I thought, but it's really difficult to tell.
And all we know is that commissions are their main monetization source. Uh so we'll take it.
We'll take it at face value. Major props to the team behind this directory.
If you got some ideas,
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let me know in the comments below. I genuinely think the funeral home one is a really good directory to go and compete with.
Uh not because they're a weak competitor. I think their directory was incredible.
It's just one of those niches where there's so much room to win. But the search falling behind those
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keywords is what made that really juicy and tempting to go and build in. If you want another theme to go along with the next profitable directories you never heard of, let me know, too.
I always like to find the more untapped ones, the unique and weird ones, uh, and the ones that are really well built. So, would
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love to hear your feedback. And again, if you want some updates, some short stories, some lessons that I learned building my own profitable directories, you can join my newsletter, the ship your directory newsletter down below in the description.
With that, I appreciate you watching. Always appreciate the support, and I will catch you in another video.
See you.