Bro's "directory" website is doing $35k per month? | Starter Story

One weekend in 2022, three developers in a Discord server decided to scratch their own itch: they wanted a central place to find interesting open-source projects built with the Curses programming language. They threw together a simple directory site, called Curses Directory, in about 48 hours. It now does $35,000 per month in revenue, serves 2.2 million unique visitors since launch, and costs under $500 per month to operate. Maintenance takes roughly three hours per month because the entire project is open-source — users submit changes via pull requests on GitHub.

The directory as a business model

A directory website is essentially a curated, searchable list of resources — in this case, Curses language projects, tools, and libraries. The founders built it because they themselves needed it, and they assumed other developers in the same niche would too. They were right. But the key insight was not just that a directory could attract traffic; it was that a narrow, well-defined niche (Curses developers) could sustain a small, profitable business without requiring constant feature work or a large team.