I make $32K/month from 3 simple, boring websites

While fundraising for his fintech app, the founder manually searched the internet to build a list of investors to cold email. Reasoning other early-stage founders had the same pain, a few people manually built a database of ~40,000 investors and launched it as Angel Match on Product Hunt to test demand. He recommends the same sequence: pick a database that solves a specific problem, collect the data manually (or automate if technical), then launch to get eyeballs and see if people pay or sign up.

After seeing only ~60 clicks/day in Google Analytics and reasoning that 10x traffic could mean 10x MRR, hired six content writers to publish blog posts consistently, while the tech team built and launched free tools and other useful content for the target users. Kept it up for 6-8 months before traffic grew.

Uses programmatic SEO on the database products (pages generated from the data). The founder says SEO works very well for directory and database products and that consistency is key. No details on page templates or volume were given.

Investor Hunt gets no marketing effort besides SEO.

Added Meta (Facebook) ads alongside SEO; described as 'a little bit' of paid traffic. No budget, targeting or creative details given.

Angel Match subscriptions start at $59/month and go up to a few thousand dollars, depending on how many investors the customer wants to reach out to per month (outreach runs inside the product via Nylas email). Free trial before paying.

Built three near-identical database products for slightly different needs: Angel Match (125K angels/VCs for early-stage founders), Investor Hunt (investor database, $57/$97/$297) and Journalist Hunt (200K journalists for small businesses and media companies seeking press, $49-$99/month tiers).

After a $100K friends-and-family round ran out, the founders manually searched the internet to build a list of angels and VCs and cold emailed them.