There’s this video on TikTok that my 30-year old ass loves – it’s of a husband coming home from work, and his partner and kids are waiting for him on the driveway.
One of the top comments say “this is the rich i want to be.”
I think about this a lot, but not because of the obvious “family is everything” angle, which is wholesome and all.
At the core, it’s that feeling of being valued that does it for me.
Selfishly, that’s what I crave for the most, whether it’s in business or personal life stuff.
As silly as it sounds, I get a steady dose of feeling valued from my directory websites on a weekly basis.
Sometimes, I’ll just login to my Google Analytics to see how many people are on my websites in real-time.
screenshot taken 2/22/25 at 3:30pm PST
It’s a reminder that at any given moment, people from all over the country are using something that I created.
Even if it’s just for 30 seconds, it’s wild to think that I’m behind thousands of hours of time spent by strangers I’ll never meet.
It’s one of the most underrated benefits of building a micro-business.
At this point in my solopreneur journey, I’ve realized that feeling valued almost always starts with giving value first.
It creates this simple flywheel effect that goes like:
Give value
Acknowledge the value
Build confidence in giving value
Give more value
Eventually profit
Seeing the proof of my ability to offer value is what keeps me going whenever I feel like giving up.
I’ve noticed that the longer I’m willing to give without expecting anything in return, the bigger my “profit” volcano will eventually erupt.
p.s. this is the reason I like to wait until a directory gets 3k-5k/monthly visitors before putting on display ads.
So if you’re building directories for the passive income, that’s awesome, and I’m genuinely excited for you.
But what excites me even more is helping you get to a point where you can soak up the good vibes that come from saving people time.
I built my first Saas!
Speaking of saving people time, I launched my first SaaS this week with my buddy Minh with this exact goal in mind.
We’re tackling the problem of manually enriching your listing pages – a tedious and boring part that’s necessary for every directory I build.
It’s a data enrichment tool that helps enrich your location data with Google Maps Reviews in minutes.
So far, it has personally saved me over 300 hours while building out my dog park directory.
We’re giving you free credits, so if you have 40 rows and two keywords to enrich (i.e. shade and benches for dog parks), you can enrich your data for free.
