AI Summary
5 min readCursor Directory: A Three-Hour Build That Generates $34,000 a Month
Pontus and his co-founder Victor had been bootstrapping their main startup, Meeting, for two years when Pontus took a three-hour flight to France. During the flight, he downloaded videos about Cursor, an AI code editor, and noticed a pattern: developers were creating "rules" to customize Cursor's behavior, but there was no centralized place to find them. You could dig up obscure GitHub gists or forum posts, but nothing organized existed. "That's basically how the idea came up," Pontus says.
The second he landed, he called Victor. "We need to create a directory for Cursor rules." Victor spun up a Figma design while Pontus started a Next.js project with a hardcoded JSON file of rules he'd collected. Within thirty minutes they had something clickable. They bought the domain cursor.directory. Three hours total after landing, the site was live.
That three-hour project now has 49,000 registered users, 2.2 million unique visitors since launch, and generates $34,000 per month. Gross margin is 99.8 percent. Operational costs run under $500 a month. Maintenance takes about three hours per month. The entire codebase is open source on GitHub.
The Launch That Caught a Wave
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:32) **Origin Story: A Three-Hour Build on a Flight to France** - Pontus spotted an unmet need for Cursor rules during a flight, called his co-founder Victor immediately upon landing, and they built the entire directory in three hours.
- 2 (03:50) **The Business in a Nutshell: $34K/Month, 99.8% Margins** - Pontus reveals the core metrics of the directory, including 49,000 registered users and 2.2 million unique visitors, all with minimal ongoing effort.
- 3 (04:48) **The "Aha" Moment: Spotting a Pattern No One Else Had Collected** - Pontus explains how he identified the opportunity by observing a common problem in the AI developer community.
- 4 (06:07) **The Philosophy of Shipping Fast: "Just Have the Balls to Launch"** - Pontus argues that the willingness to ship an imperfect product is a key competitive advantage, especially in the AI era.
- 5 (07:09) **The Launch Strategy: One Tweet, One Hacker News Post, and Viral Coverage** - Pontus shares the exact channels that drove millions of users to the directory in its first week.
- 6 (09:31) **Design as a Competitive Moat: "It's More Important Than Ever"** - Pontus explains why the directory's polished design was a key driver of its viral growth, and how others can replicate this advantage.
- 7 (11:56) **Are Directories Dead? "Directories Still Work in 2025"** - Pontus directly addresses the skepticism around directories, explaining why they remain a powerful business model.
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Show Notes
My website makes $34K/month (built in 3 hours)Sharing ideas that make money! ----------- Keywords: app development, app flipping, app monetization, startup advice, entrepreneur stories, startup founder, micro saas, online business
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