AI Made the Most Passive Side Hustle Even Easier

Some businesses were here before AI and they're going to be here long after AI. And one of those is a boring old directory site. And if you don't know what a directory site is, they're sites that look like this or this or even ugly ones like this. I'm going to build one of these today using an AI tool that will pit a bunch of AI models against each other so I can be sure that I'm getting the best one. Not just that, but I'm going to ask the AI tool which type of directory should I even build? Because I don't know what type of directory is the most likely to get a lot of traffic, therefore make me a lot of money. I'm going to use this tool to do all of that. It used to take a developer months worth of work even to build a simple directory website, but today we can do that in minutes. And believe it or not, there are still a zillion directory opportunities out there because there's so many niches that people aren't even thinking about. What I love about directories is that once they're built, they're quite passive. They basically run themselves. You can monetize with ads, subscriptions, or you can collect leads organically and sell them to the businesses that are listed on the directory site. But enough talking. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to build one live, share my screen, show you the prompts, I'm going to show you how to do it, connect payments, and publish it to the internet all throughout the course of this video. So to start, we're going to go to this website right here, chatllm.abacus.ai. This is the tool that enables us to use all the different models in one chat interface and even make them compete against each other so we can be sure to get the best output. The link to this is in the description, by the way. So we're talking ChatGPT 5.6, Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5, Grok, DeepSeek, and a bunch of other models you've probably never heard of. And we can access any of them just by hitting this dropdown, going to chat, and then we go to this dropdown and picking the one that we prefer, or we just pick RoutLLM, and that will automatically make all of them compete against each other and just give us the best possible output. Now, if we want this tool to be an AI agent to go out and then use these models and actually do stuff for us, then we're just gonna hit this dropdown and click agent, and it costs about $10 a month, which is less than what any of these individual tools would charge you for the same pro models that you get right here. Okay, but we're gonna start with the old standby. Which is ChatGPT 5.6. Boom, right there. Here's my prompt. What's an underserved local directory niche I could build and monetize? Give me one specific niche, who pays for it, and how it makes money. Okay, super fast. Commercial kitchen equipment repair directory. Not anything I would ever think of, but for some reason ChatGPT is seeing signals out there that tells it that this is an underserved niche directory idea. But we're not content with this. We're going to give it the same prompt. We're going to paste it. We're going to go Opus 4.8, which is one of my favorites right now. Same prompt, hit enter. Estate cleanout and senior downsizing directory. Never would have thought of that either. Now let's go to my least favorite model right now. Sorry, Google. Gemini 3.5. Same prompt. Hit enter. And remember, how I feel about these ideas doesn't really mean anything. I haven't done enough research to know which of these 3 ideas is the best. Okay. Gemini says aging in place and accessibility home modification directory. Another very random one I never would have thought of. So commercial kitchen equipment from Claude, Claude thinks this niche is attractive because it avoids the crowded generic local business directory. That is true. Oops, sorry, that was ChatGPT that said that. And Claude thinks the estate cleanout directory is underserved because people that are searching for this tool are grieving, overwhelmed, and time-pressed, and they want a trusted shortlist not to vet 15 different companies. All right, I like that. And then Gemini thinks that aging in place as a directory is underserved because, well, it didn't, it didn't tell me why. So call it confirmation bias, but telling you, I don't really like Gemini. But hey, if it wins, it wins. Okay, let's pick a winner. So we've got one B2B directory, business to business. That one's from ChatGPT, commercial kitchen equipment repair directory. It's not going to be consumers searching for that. So I like that because it's higher dollar value. You can usually make more money in business to business businesses, but it's also harder to get traction there. It's harder to break through to a decision maker. That's the trade-off that you make. And the other two directory ideas are consumer ideas. These are just individuals, normal civilians searching for these things, which typically make less money, but it's easier to break through to consumers. There's no decision maker. You're talking directly to the person that will be paying you. Okay, call it bias. Doesn't matter. I really like this estate cleanout and senior downsizing directory the most. Maybe because I just have a good friend that's making a lot of money going to estates and basically selling all the leftovers. So an estate sale will happen and there's always a bunch of stuff left over and he will go in like the day after it ends and say, hey, you know, all this stuff left over, I'll give you $200 for it. And usually they're just happy to get rid of it because what are they going to do with it? They're going to have to list it individually on Facebook Marketplace. That's his whole niche. And he makes a lot of money doing it. He travels around the country doing that. So we're all biased creatures. I know that this is growing like crazy. There are 10,000 baby boomers retiring every single day and their kids, their millennial kids like me, need to sell their parents' stuff as they unfortunately move on to the next life. So I like Claude. I have a friend that's doing this and I like selling to consumers more than businesses. But let's do one more step. I'm going to go to trends.google.com. I'm just going to search for the phrase estate sale over the last 5 years. Okay, let's go 2004 to present. Okay, so it dropped from 2004 until about 2024 for some reason. Now it's heading back up. I don't know why it would have been dropping. That's kind of an interesting phenomenon that I didn't expect, but It's going back up. So I like that. But while we're pitting these models against each other, let's put Google Trends terms, search terms against each other as well, side by side by side. So we can see what the demand shows on the search side of things. Right here, I'm going to type in a much, much, much more niche term, commercial kitchen equipment repair. Of course, there's a ton more people searching for the term estate sale than commercial kitchen equipment repair, but we're still going to get an accurate view of how all 3 of these terms are trending. So you can see this is basically not moving the needle at all. There's very, very few companies searching for this term. So it's probably not fair to compare these against each other. Let's just search equipment repair. Okay, so that's trending upwards, the red line right there. And then over here, we're going to search aging in place. All right, let's go ahead and delete the term estate sale so we can get a more accurate view of this. So equipment repair is booming, but this could be heavy equipment repair. It could be anything. But clearly these two terms are both growing more than estate sale. But of course it's not really fair to do estate sale because we're not looking for people that are searching for an estate sale. We're looking for people that are about to host an estate sale. So I just searched for the term how to host an estate sale, and the search volume basically went from nothing to 100 over the last month or two. And if you search host estate sale, it looks the same. So I realized I just went back to the actual output from the prompt and we're talking about estate cleanout help. So when I search for the phrase estate cleanout, it is the best looking chart that I've seen thus far in all of the estate categories. Like it's just looking really, really spicy right now. So we're going to stick with estates. So here's my prompt now. Compile 20 real estate cleanout businesses in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area. For each one, give the business name, category, phone, and a one-line description. Put it all in a table. Now, very important that on this one I choose Routllm because it's going to choose the best model to do the heavy lifting because this prompt is, is a much heavier prompt, for lack of a better word, than the ones that we had just done. Boom. Okay, so it looks like we've got some junk removal businesses, some cleanout businesses, mostly junk removal businesses because honestly, how many like estate cleanout businesses are out there? Which by the way, that's probably a really good business. It's kind of like what my friend's doing. I mean, it only got 11 or 12, 11, and I asked for 20. So what's cool here is you can see the thinking that it did, and then you can regenerate the output to this prompt using whatever model you want. So I'm going to have it regenerate it with Claude Opus 4.8 because it's my favorite. Quick note on this. You want to fact check all of these listings before we publish them on a directory website. I love getting an output from a model and then using a different model that's unbiased to fact check everything in that output. Right? In other words, is the phone number for this junk removal business accurate or the address or the website, etc.? So Claude wins again. I actually got 20 results this time because I regenerated with Claude. I'm going to do a Ctrl+Find for the word clean out, Phenom Clean Out, Commercial Care. Okay. Estate Pros. Not only did I get 20 this time, but they seem to be more relevant because come on, Dallas-Fort Worth has 8 million people. Surely there are 20 relevant businesses that do something like this. And what's cool is even if we get Abacus to regenerate the output, we don't lose the original. 1, because I still want to see what ChatGPT 5.5 can do here. But if you just click these arrow buttons, you can see all of the different regenerations. So let's go ahead and see what GPT 5.5 can do. And then just for fun, let's see what Fable 5 can do, because that's the best right now, in my opinion. I just realized my prompt does something stupid. 20 real estate cleanout businesses. That is different than like an estate sale cleanout business. I meant to say 20 real estate. So I'm going to redo this altogether and I will probably get a better output. Remember, when it comes to AI, garbage in equals garbage out. And I make mistakes here just like anyone else. And we don't edit those out. Remember, I can still use the output from these other prompts even if it had a bad input because there are still good businesses in those tables. But I'm going to go ahead and give it a better prompt that says compile 20 real businesses that do estate sale cleanouts in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area. And the rest is the same. So we're going to do that with Routllm to see which model it uses. Side note, I'm not sure if you've heard the phrase token maxing, right? But you should do that. It's basically using AI models that are way more powerful than what you need done, right? You want a restaurant for date night? Use Fable-5. Why not? If you're paying for Fable-5, use the heck out of it for no other reason so you can better learn these models and like the nuances of them and how to prompt them and what their outputs look like as compared to other models until you get to the point where you're hitting your limits regularly. Token max the heck out of these models. Okay, here's my output here. We've got 20 results this time. DFW. I want to see what Fable-5 can do. So I'm going to put the same prompt there and then choose Fable-5 from the dropdown instead of RoutLLM. But I really like what RoutLLM gave me here. This is making me realize that there, there is a big opportunity for these estate sale cleanout businesses. Most people aren't going to think to hire a junk removal business. They hear junk removal and they think hoarder. My mother's not a hoarder. My grandmother's not a hoarder. Like, they almost might find it disrespectful to hire a junk removal business to get rid of those last few things that didn't sell from her estate sale. They might be china cabinets. They might be valuable. They might have been impeccably maintained over the last century. So we don't think to go to junk removal. It's not junk. It's their prized possessions, right? So the naming of a business really, really matters how you position yourself. And if you call yourself the Estate Cleanout Pros, then you're probably not going to get many calls for a hoarder house or junk removal house. You're going to lose that. But the trade-off is that you are going to be known as the guy or the gal for estate sale cleanouts. And what's better about the estate sale cleanout business? I know this video is supposed to be about directories, but we're going to tangent just for a minute because the ADHD is flaring and we, we give in to that. What's better about an estate sale cleanout business than junk removal business is that you get more stuff that you can sell, right? Which is what a lot of junk removal businesses do to make a lot of their profit. They get a bunch of stuff that's like, oh, we're not taking this to the dump. We're selling this on Facebook Marketplace. They make a ton of money doing that. But in the estate sale cleanout business, that's mostly what you get, stuff that you can resell. So you're getting paid, not getting it for free, but you are getting paid to take things that you can sell. That's called a negative cost of goods sold business or a negative COGS business. And it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. You're getting paid to get paid, but we're here for directories, passive business, not active. Sorry. Okay, so here was the Routllm output. Here's the Fable5 output. If you do a Ctrl+Find, for the word estate. Look at the Fable-5 output. Okay. And let's just look at the business name. 1, 2, 3. It's pretty clear that there are more results tied directly to estate sales and not junk removal because look, Estate Liquidators, Rare Find Estate Sales. Actually, I take that back. The outputs look pretty similar. I'd be curious if Routllm used Fable-5 on its output as well. Okay, so we've got plenty to work with. Now we want to use an AI agent to do the heavy lifting for us because we don't know how to do the heavy lifting in this case. No pun intended. Estate sales, china cabinets. Sorry, it was dumb. Okay, we're going to go back to Abacus. We're going to hit this purple button. We're going to hit this dropdown, go from chat to agent. But wait, we've got to get that table to give it to it. We're going to go back here. We'll use Fable 5 and we just click this little download button in the top right. That's it. We don't need to prompt it again. Okay, we've got agent. Here's our prompt. Build a directory website that lists estate sale clean out businesses. Include a searchable homepage, category pages, and individual listing pages with a photo description and contact info. Prefill it with the list I attached. Add a paid featured listing upgrade with Stripe so a business can pay $30 a month to appear at the top. Okay, we've got agent. We're going to hit the plus button, upload from computer, get the CSV that I just downloaded from the other chat window and hit enter. I'll get started on building that directory website for you right away. This is the part that used to take a developer weeks or even months and we could do like a DFW directory for estate sales, but what the heck, let's go nationwide. If after a few months we see that a lot of these searches are coming from the DFW area, then we can always spend $10, buy another domain name, put the letters DFW in there and make this more niche down. I don't think there's a need for that. I think this is already so niche that we want to go more broad on their geography, right? If the industry is very niche, then the geography should be more broad. If the geography is very broad, like for instance, a small neighborhood in Dallas or a small suburb of Dallas, then the industry should be more broad. Right. But some industries and/or geographies have enough search demand to where you can go niche on both. I just don't think estate sale cleanouts is one of them. So the agent has a few questions for me. So I'm going to put 1. The name is going to be Estate Cleanout Pros. 2. Should businesses be able to submit their own listing? Yes. 3. Categories. Are there specific categories you'd like to organize listings by? Infer from the data. 4. When a business pays for a featured listings, where should payment confirmation emails be sent? Now that's one I like to answer. I'll put in my email here. 5 color scheme. Let's do clean and minimal. And I like that it gave me the option to just say go ahead and it would guess all 5 of my answers for these, but it only took me about a minute to give it those answers. Okay, now it needs Stripe API credentials from me. And if you don't know what that means, it basically just means it needs to know how to talk to my Stripe account so I can accept money, which is the most important part of this whole endeavor. So it gives me instructions on how to find that. Thankfully, I've done this a zillion times. I'll show you how to do that. And then it just needs my secret key. So log into my Stripe account. It takes 30 seconds to create this. I'm going to go to the search bar and do API keys. I'm going to hit this plus button, create secret key, powering an integration you built. I'm going to use my touchpad. I'm going to name it Estate Cleanout Pros. Okay, there's my key. That's my secret key and this is my publishable key. We're going to go there, submit, and voilà, we have payments connected. Okay, that's done. Now it's actually building the website. All right. I'll build this full feature directory website step by step. Let me start by reading the CSV data and the style guide. Okay. So if we wanted to really scale this, we need a lot more directory businesses because this is only DFW. So to do that, we go back to Abacus. I personally, you can do whatever you want, would choose Fable 5. Because that's the one that just will do the most work and it will work the longest to get you the output that you really need. And I would just basically give it the same prompt and just say nationwide and then even tell it specifically there should be over 1,000 listings here. Sometimes you need to tell the model how hard it needs to work because it's always going to default for less work because it doesn't want us to be token maxing. It wants— the company wants to save money, right? And the more we token max, the less money. Anthropic, ChatGPT, Gemini, whoever makes, but they're funded by VCs. They're trillion-dollar companies. They're doing fine. A lot of stuff going on here that I don't understand, but I know that when it's done, I just need to click this button up here on the top right, deploy. It's generating all the images for the site right now. You couldn't pay me to understand what Ubuntu sandbox means. Ubuntu sounds like a Mongolian appetizer or something. Ooh, okay. We got some pictures here, some good images. Okay, we're done. The web app is ready. Let's see how it looks. Okay. Estate Cleanout Pros. Get features. Featured, submit listing. We've got a search bar right here. Okay, we've got filter buttons here. Click on that. Boom, filter buttons work great. Submit free listing, get featured. Cool. All right, and then this is the Stripe integration that we're looking at live. That seems to work. Loads really fast. It's responsive. We want to see how it looks on mobile. Looks great. Presentation view, desktop, etc. Cool. Go to the search bar, just do junk. Let's go ahead and click deploy. We'll put it on an Abacus domain name for now. Boom, done. Okay, so if we wanna see how it looks on the actual internet, we can go here and we'll type /admin. Then it gave us a password to enter. And then here's what it looks like on the backend. We can see how many, um, listings there are, how many featured, how many are pending to be featured. And there's only 20 cuz we only gave it 20, but it would upload as many as we gave it. Now let's add some more images to this because the ones it gave me are decent, but But I want some better ones. Okay, we're going to go click on image up here at the top and take the URL and say, make a hero image for this site. Because if you need images for your site or for ads or whatever, it's built right here into Abacus so we can have it choose the model for us. But I love GPT Image 2. I think it's the best image model on the market right now. So I'm going to purposely give it a very light prompt because I want to see how well it thinks. Okay, let's talk about how this website and other directory websites like it can actually make us money. Number 1, featured positioning, featured placements of the businesses that we list on the directory. We're listing these businesses on the directory without their permission. We don't need to ask their permission because we're doing them a favor and we'll leave it on our website forever for free. They only need to pay if they want higher placement, and it only really makes sense for them to pay for higher placement once they're actually getting some leads and some traffic from our website. Another way we can make money here is just by banner ads. Now, this is probably the lowest friction, most passive way of making money on most websites., but it's also like the lowest and worst use of these clicks, of this valuable attention that we're able to garner here. So that's the trade-off you're making. Another thing we can do is just kind of collect leads from consumers that need an estate sale cleanout, and they can all go to us directly instead of to the businesses in the directory. And then we can reach out to the businesses in the directory and sell them to the highest bidder. We could literally email all of them at the same time and say, hey, I have this lead, it's in this neighborhood. We think it's worth this much. Who wants it? And just let the bidding begin. I think directories are going to be more important than ever with the advent of AI because it needs more good, knowledgeable, well-organized sources to pull from. And a directory is a super efficient way of getting that done. Okay. It looks like it created a polished hero image that matches the look and feel. I like how the colors match. Looks good. Cool. We can add that right to the website. Now, if we wanted to make a video, that's just as easy as an image, and you can choose the model that it uses, CLING, Seedance, et cetera. We don't really need to do that right now. A pitch deck, if we wanted to raise money for this, you could do that with a couple clicks. Slides, you just choose that little connector right there. You can invite teammates to collaborate on these projects with you. Think about it, if you paid for all of these premium models, it costs between $20 and $200 a month for them each, but Abacus is only $10 a month. Month total for usage of all of these combined. If you want to use ChatLLM by Abacus AI, check out the link in my description. They support the channel. I use them. They're awesome. Go build something today, not next week, today. There's never been a better time in the whole history of this wonderful universe. We'll see you next time on the Koerner Office.