Can we win the $52B Market with no experience?
Sure, why not? AI can do anything!
How to transform an industry by prompting AI
Directory websites are making a comeback. If you can build something people actually want to click on, you can monetize that traffic. At least, that's the theory. I'd never built a directory before, but when Nik invited me onto his podcast to discuss AI in life and business—and to build one live on air—we dove right in. What started as a casual demo evolved into Emergency Local Services, a directory with over 8,000 pages listing emergency services across numerous U.S. locations.
Your time is perhaps best spent watching the podcast because while I can write about all the technical challenges I had encountered on day one of this project, it would only be a glimpse at the overall complexity. By watching the episode though, you might get inspired by seeing how easy it is to get started, and how much we can now do by making AI do it for us.
Some folks accused me of showing off, but after coding with AI for 8–18 hours a day over the past six months, I'm just excited to demonstrate how powerful these tools are. The view stats on that video are pretty insane, and it’s only been a few days!
Nik is an excellent host!
Why did we need this directory anyway?
Imagine it's 2 AM, a pipe bursts in your kitchen, and you're desperately searching "emergency plumber near me." You end up with outdated listings, fake reviews, and contractors who ghosted the internet years ago. This happens millions of times a year in the $52 billion emergency services market—an industry that's oddly resistant to digital innovation.
The core issue isn't finding contractors; it's finding reliable ones with up-to-date info, tailored to your specific need, and available now. How?
Traditional directories (even Google Maps) fall short because they depend on self-reported data, rare updates, and simplistic filters. But what if AI and automation could reinvent how we discover emergency contractors?
Here’s the kicker. We are not creating more data, we are just organizing existing data in a way that is easier to find.
What does it mean to make something easier to find? That’s a good question, and that answer will depend specifically on the directory you are building, for the purpose you are trying to achieve, for the search environment that you want to own.
For example, if you want an HVAC repair in South Boston, and if you want your tech to be LGBTQ friendly, can you get one right now? No, at least not right away. You first have to go through all the Hvac repair techs in your area, figure out who is currently available, look at the filters to see if they are friendly, and then call every one of them. You can do all of that, or just live without an AC.
This is just the type of problem we would try to solve with our directory.
The directory is a beast. It could be a never-ending project because there’s always more to add, and the best you can do is keep adding move value to the end user. The biggest cost is time, plus a little bit of API usage here and there.
As you will see in the video, AI makes it really easy to write code, but it doesn’t solve all the problems. It doesn’t solve the problem of poor, inconsistent, and hard to access data, or hosting constrains when you try to display hundreds of megabytes of JSON files. AI can help me automate processes, but it doesn’t quite know how to get API keys from various municipal websites. AI doesn’t know what “quality data” means, and it can only help me cleanup, once provided with instructions.
If you want more technical aspects of the build, give me a shout (kirillzubovsky.com). I don’t think most of my readers right care to see the code or to hear about the struggles of organizing and hosting way-too-much data, but I am happy to talk about it 1-1.
—Kirill
p.s. While building the directory, Kerry and I realized there was another massive untapped opportunity — AI SEO — and we decided to add it to the GA4Hell.com offering. A few weeks later, AI SEO is all that we focus on at GA4Hell. Traditional SEO is still useful of course, but AI SEO is something that no one understand, and yet everyone wants to know more about.
Send me your questions, or drop a comment below.