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I’ve never shared MRR before, but here’s the crazy story of how we built Cursor Directory, a 3-hour hack that now makes $35k/month.
It started right before I moved to France.
I had downloaded some videos for the flight, stumbled upon .cursorrules, and immediately called Viktor: “We need to build a website for these.”
Three hours later, Cursor Directory was live.
Within minutes, thousands of visitors landed on the site.
While we focused on our main startup Midday, the directory kept exploding:
- Covered by major tech YouTubers
- Shared in meetups worldwide
- Quickly hitting 150k unique visitors/month
Then came MCPs
We added a simple page to explore them. Traffic spiked to 200k/month.
Since all traffic was organic, we tried ads. I posted here on X with a payment link.
Minutes later - every slot was sold out.
From there, we kept adding:
- Job listings
- Featured MCPs
- Company profiles
- User profiles
- Rules generator
And more ways for people to discover, share, and connect.
That pushed us to 295k unique visitors/month.
What started as a fun weekend hack has turned into something far bigger:
- $35k+ MRR from ads & listings
- $150k+ in profit (yes)
- 55.5k registered users
We could only dream of this outcome.
Lesson? Sometimes the smallest hacks create the biggest waves.
Cursor Directory has opened more doors than we could’ve imagined and it all started with a 3-hour flight.
@MarcelFromMimic 5500 one consists of
tweakcn(.)com claude theme,
21stdev @MeschacIrung ‘s hero section 1 21st.dev/meschacirung/h… ,
features is typical bento grid,
globe from 21stdev,
and again a benefits u can find that too
In short the one in the right should be 300
@pontusab Am I oversimplifying it, or is there smth else you're tryna achieve with the server-side PDF-to-image conversion?
I generate PDF previews by creating a temporary blob URL in the browser and displaying the full PDF natively in an <iframe>, with zero server-side processing.
@forgebitz Just fork cal.com and customize the branding as u wish, configure auth/email etc., make the source code publicly available (AGPLv3 stuff) and u have a calendly clone
@pontusab Incredible work!
What I do to cut the cost of OCR if I’m dealing with bunch of PDFs is use pdfjs-dist to check each page, if it lacks text, it’s likely image-based and needs OCR and other pages can be parsed with pdf-parse.
@pontusab You should add something like what clio(.)com have, some people track their time as passive and active and they have a tracker where when u stop it, it automatically creates a form populated with the time data the tracker has
@shadcn But customization/theming and design should be the key difference between the apps, we shouldn’t see same interfaces amongst thousands of different apps.
Alright, check this out!
I'm going to build a custom dashboard with supabase auth and a custom theme by "piecing together blocks from the Web".
1/n - Let's start by adding the dashboard block from shadcn/ui:
@sirajraval Not hating but u don’t even have privacy policy/terms of service/cookie policy/any legal stuff that protects you, hero icons’ colors are not correct(they blend in with the background), one of the footer’s cards goes out of the viewport. This is not a proper way of doing business