Two of seven make money

Pottydirectory took three months to stand up the first time. It’s been most of a year since, and I’m still standing it up.

Six months in, someone asked to buy my list. That’s the moment I understood it might be worth something to somebody besides me. A stranger, asking for the data.

It still isn’t profitable. What it paid me instead: Cloudflare, Supabase, SQL, Astro, Tailwind, data hygiene, SEO. A year of homework I assigned myself on nights and weekends, and it taught me more than any semester I sat through in college.

I built the supply side first: 3,400 providers listed, zero dollars collected. That’s the half of the business I already knew how to build. Rows, a schema, a crawl, a listing page.

The demand side, the half that would have actually generated revenue, I left alone. I didn’t know how to build it yet.

That’s the trap. You ship the part you’re good at. The count goes up. It feels like the business is moving. What’s actually happening is you’re doing more of what you already know, not what you’d have to learn to make it work.

I don’t have the demand side built. I know which half of pottydirectory is empty, and I know I built the other half first because it was easier, not because it came first in the plan.