How This Directory
Was Built
A step-by-step breakdown of how I built a nationwide luxury restroom trailer directory from scratch, including the data collection, AI enrichment, and technical implementation.
My 5 Step Directory Framework
Every successful directory follows this process. This page focuses on Step 2, the most time consuming but most valuable part.
All You Need to Get Started
The Data Collection Process
Click each step to expand and see the details, tools used, and download the data files.
The foundation of any directory is data. I used Outscraper, a Google Maps scraping service, to collect portable restroom and sanitation businesses across the entire United States. This single scraping job pulled every business that could potentially offer luxury restroom trailer rentals.
What I Did
- Used Outscraper's Google Maps scraping API to find businesses
- Searched for broad keywords like "portable restrooms", "porta potty rentals", "sanitation services"
- Cast a wide net to capture any business that might offer luxury trailer options
- Each row contains business name, address, phone, website, coordinates, reviews, and more
- Raw data included many businesses that don't offer luxury trailers, so filtering comes later
⚠️Problems
The raw data contained a ton of junk and irrelevant listings like construction companies, septic tank services, plumbing businesses, and other companies that have nothing to do with portable restroom rentals. This data needed serious cleaning before it could be useful.
Result
A massive dataset of 71,865 portable restroom businesses nationwide across 5 CSV files. However, this raw data included everything from basic porta potty companies to industrial sanitation services, most of which don't actually offer luxury restroom trailers. The next step would be to filter and classify this data.
What's Next?
With the data collection complete, it's time to build the actual website.
Create & Organize Your Data
Take everything you scraped, cleaned, and enriched and strip away the columns that don't need to be displayed on your directory. Keep only the columns that will be useful for users browsing your site. This becomes the blueprint for your Supabase database.
What to consider:
- Which columns help users make decisions? (Keep these)
- Which columns are internal or redundant? (Remove these)
- What filters do users need? (These become filterable fields)
Create the Supabase Database
Give your organized CSV to Claude Code and have it create the Supabase database schema for you. I like to install the Supabase MCP beforehand so Claude Code can create tables, set up columns, and insert data directly without me having to copy and paste SQL.
The process:
- Install the Supabase MCP in Claude Code
- Give Claude your organized CSV and ask it to create the database schema
- Claude creates the tables and inserts all your data automatically
Build Your Directory 🎉
This is the fun part. Go buckwild with prompting Claude Code to build your directory. Start with a homepage, create listing pages, add search and filtering, and iterate until you're happy with it. The key is to keep prompting and refining.
💡 Pro Tip: SEO from the Start
When prompting Claude Code, tell it to follow SEO best practices for your target keyword. For this directory, I told Claude to optimize for "luxury restroom trailers" and it automatically structured URLs, meta tags, headings, and content around that keyword.
Directory Ideas to Get You Started
Once you nail this process, the possibilities are endless. Here are some approaches to spark ideas.
Niche Down on Competitive Categories
You're not going to rank for broad, competitive keywords. But you can carve out a niche within those categories that's specific enough to win.
Examples:
"Senior living" is too competitive. But "senior living homes for people with dementia"? That's a play. Same with "bathroom contractors" vs "ADA bathroom contractors" for aging-in-place renovations. Find the successful directories in your space and ask yourself: what specific subset of this audience is underserved?
Boring, Mundane, and Important Data
Some of the best directories aren't sexy. They're useful. Look for data that people need but isn't presented well anywhere.
Real Example:
Andy, a member of our directory community, built a tap water quality directory. In 3 months, it's getting over 40,000 organic monthly visitors with zero backlinks. He monetizes with Mediavine ads and Amazon affiliate links for water filters. His approach: scrape data from multiple government sources and create a hybrid version that's more helpful than any single source.
Event Directories
Event directories have historically been bad because they require constant maintenance. Events come and go, dates change, and stale data kills user trust. Most people avoid them for this reason.
The unlock:
If you can build a system that automatically scrapes, updates, and maintains event data with minimal time investment, you've unlocked a category that most people avoid. The same AI powered scraping process that built this directory can keep an event directory fresh.
Want to Build Something Similar?
Follow along with the full tutorial series on YouTube or listen to the podcast episode.