John Rush grew his portfolio by validating ideas through public pain-sharing and waitlists before writing any code, using SEO and daily social content to drive early users, then connecting his 20+ tools into an ecosystem where users flow from free/traffic tools into paid products via cross-promotion and native integrations.

“I don't even build a product. I actually deliver the solution manually. At this stage, I don't care about the margins yet. I just care about the solution being delivered to the customers and whether they actually satisfied with that.”

“Before my product is great, I usually go for SEO. And then the second most popular method I have is social media marketing. So I run that on X, on LinkedIn, on Substack, on Facebook, everywhere. I repurpose the same content on all platforms and I do that every day.”

“I have over 20 tools where some tools are premium tools I make money on and some tools are just to bring traffic in and channel it to my premium tools. Users natively float from product to product and end up using my entire ecosystem.”

“Before building in public, my failure rate was really high. 90% of the things I've done failed. And when I start building in public, it flipped. So now only 10% of my products fail and 90% don't fail because I adjust them before I ship them just because I build in public.”

John Rush grows by building tools to solve his own operational pain first, validating demand through Google autocomplete keyword research and cold social outreach before writing a line of product code, and then compounding growth by cross-selling users across his 24-tool portfolio so that even a $1K/month tool feeds revenue into his larger products. He starts SEO on day one of every project, treating early article traffic as a second validation signal rather than waiting for a product to be mature.

“I usually start SEO work on a day one. In that case, I can just post the product and wait for a few months and then come back and see whether there's traffic from SEO. And that's interesting. So SEO traffic is a new source of validation because you know one thing that you have to also validate with a product is not just if people want it but also if you're able to drive traffic there.”

“right now they don't really respect the follower count as it did in the past. So if your content is interesting they will show it to a few people and if they find it interesting they will show it to more people and eventually it can blow up even without followers. So you should try that.”

“directories are so good at driving traffic from people who would otherwise not land on your website. Most of my directories are making 1K a month. Some make 10K, but most make just 1K.”

“you should try to kill your idea because there are so many ideas. You rather kill, you know, 20 of them and 21 works out and then you don't waste time building it, right? Because building an idea takes a lot of time.”

John Rush built 50+ directories (12 performing well) by treating them as a pure SEO game: success is 80% keyword research and domain selection, 15% data curation, and only 5% technology/design. His growth playbook centers on finding high-traffic, growing, low-competition keywords via Google Keyword Planner, securing a matching domain, then seeding initial traction by plugging the directory URL into relevant Reddit threads, Quora answers, and social posts where directories are welcomed because they appear non-commercial. He compounds this with listing submissions to other directories and letting great data earn organic backlinks from influencers.

“the directories are 80% success lays in keyword research and domain — that's 80% literally — the other 15% is in the data curation like actual items, and 5% is in technology what exactly is this tech or what's the design.”

“when you launch your directory the best way to promote your directory at the start is to find the questions on internet and go there and say look I built a directory that helps you — and surprisingly if you share directory under those questions even on Reddit nobody hates you nobody downvotes you because the directory is nonprofit.”

“I went to a Reddit subreddit with a viral post and I just added my site there and then the next day I woke up and I had tons of backlinks because people just created blog articles and included my link there.”

“if you start with the directory in a space you like the chance that you will be able to utilize that directory later to come up with idea for a SaaS tool is really high — and not just coming up with idea but you have the whole channel with traffic in your hand that you can drive to your SaaS tool.”

John Rush built his directory business by jumping in early on trends (he launched AllGPT right after the OpenAI demo day and it went viral), then doubling down when the market validated demand. His core GTM insight is that directories win by owning the highest-quality, most specific data in a niche — not by being first or biggest — and that winning LLM/AI search requires being present across Reddit, top Google/Bing rankings, and social UGC simultaneously. He treats thinking and research as the real work, spending months shaping a directory concept before building anything.

“The one who does the best quality and the best work kind of wins and the rest will lose.”

“I spent like month or years thinking and then people ask how long does it take to succeed and I'm like well from the moment I started building and I built it it was pretty fast but before that I just thought about it for six months.”

“If you want to play the game really really well you have to be A on Reddit, B on top of Bing, C on top of Google, and be on top of social media — so there's a tweet on the internet where somebody asks what are the best dog parks and somebody has to answer and then there has to be a link to you or description of you.”

“Whenever I had a viral tweet for my directory it just jumps out with traffic the next day — it takes just a day, it's so fast because Google has quicker reaction for social media content.”