$1500/Month Directory Website (With A Twist)

OpenAI recently released DALL•E3, a powerful image generation engine that unfortunately rendered something called AppLogoCreator obsolete 💥

AppLogoCreator is an indie project created by David Gutiérrez. Apparently it was earning $500/month before it got crushed.

But David has bounced back strong, recently tweeting…

My AI app AppLogoCreator was killed by DALL-E 3 💀

So I thought… screw it, let’s launch something FAST

1000tools was born

32 days after and it’s doing $1140 MRR 💸

Don’t lose faith and keep shipping

1000.tools is a simple directory site, with a twist.

David explains 👇

After submitting AppLogoCreator to multiple directories, I found it was getting no views/visits  

I thought it made sense because if you’re 1 of 100000, who is going to look through the whole list?

So it crossed my mind, let’s limit that to 1000 and have people pay a small fee to filter out the baddies   

To give everybody a fair spot at the top, we’ll rotate the list daily

You have to pay $6/month or $60/year to get on the list. That gives you a nice dofollow backlink on a site with rising authority 📈

The scarcity aspect is clever, reminds me of The Million Dollar Homepage.

Might be worth trying if you start your own directory site.

Looks like most of 1000.tools’ growth came via David’s Twitter and his successful Product Hunt launch, where his directory ended up #1 product of the day 🏆

His advice for growing on X (Twitter)…

I used to get 2 followers on a good day

In the last 28 days, I got 1245 followers

This has taught me one thing:

Shipping like a madman [and tweeting about it] is the best marketing strategy

💡 Another tip…

One X hack is replying early to big accounts

Yesterday @ThePeterMick wrote a “Pitch your startup” post

My reply got the most likes and as a result, was shown first

Peter’s post went viral and 1000*tools had the second most visits in one day since launch

As of writing this, 317 slots have been claimed on 1000.tools, which adds up to $1585/month if we go by the yearly prices 🤑

Although I should point out a potential issue with David’s approach: even though people are paying for them, the links on 1000.tools aren’t marked as sponsored. Which goes against Google’s guidelines 😕

So the site could eventually be punished by Google and lose rankings. Which would make it pointless for people to keep paying for listings.