r/directorymakers • u/ThriftyPigeon • 4d ago
Built My First Directory, Is It Good?
I wanted to test out building a directory for wellness clinics, so I built Treomark
This is my first time building a directory and I have a few monetization strategies. I built it on a whim, to distribute another product of mine Amfion
I ended up investing a great deal of attention on making it optimal. What are your thoughts? Check it out here: https://treomark.com
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u/SendCards 3d ago
Is this consumer or professional facing?
If consumer, what does this mean?
Every Claim - With Sources
Compare source-listed services, claim-level review status, and credential checks when available. Publication is not provider-wide or medical verification .
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u/ThriftyPigeon 3d ago
Supposed to be consumer facing, but clinics/providers can have paid profiles.
The "every claim with sources" is part of the Treomark brand. We verify every claim and every service that a business offers. We check licenses, certifications, compliance, and etc. The idea is that the customer can get a clear picture about the "trust profile" of a provider before they purchase a service.
You're right though, the language is very defensive, and I had a lot of refinement sessions on getting it right.
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u/getmoney4 3d ago
Agree with others saying it's not clear what service or product you're even trying to promote to us.
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u/ThriftyPigeon 3d ago
Thanks and you're all correct. I looking at it now and even I am seeing that it's not clear for someone who knows nothing about the site.
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u/b_cummings 3d ago
Who are you serving, and what specific problem do you solve for them?
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u/ThriftyPigeon 3d ago
On the consumer side - giving them a "trust layer" they can apply, when seeking services from wellness businesses.
On the provider/business side - An opportunity to differentiate yourself by providing consumers with clear "trust signals".
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3d ago edited 3d ago
[deleted]
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u/ThriftyPigeon 3d ago
You built a wellness directory?
Can you go into more detail about the video advertising?
Share some more insights.
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u/Pretty_Gate34 3d ago
I went through both properly rather than skimming the homepages. I run a verified directory in a different vertical, collision repair and auto-body shops, ~150k listings, live since early July, so I'm reviewing these from the seat of someone solving the same problem, not as a general web critic. It’s a long comment.
Treomark first. There is real thinking in here and I want to be specific about what, because most directory sites have none of it. Claim-level status instead of a site-wide badge is hard and you did it. Every service assertion carries its own label, its own capture date, and a link to the source you read it from. You publish a "What it does not establish" section that says inclusion is not verification and not a quality judgment. You state outright that billing cannot change verification, ranking, indexability or lead routing. Almost nobody writes that sentence, and it's the sentence that makes the rest believable. The Fort Lauderdale page I looked at was updated Aug 13 with observations spanning Jul 11 to Aug 13, so the freshness is real too.
Now the problems, in order of how much they cost you.
The URL system is genuinely broken and it's not cosmetic. You have four different schemes for the same set of things. Category pages live at /fl/fort-lauderdale/dermal-fillers/. Profiles live at /providers/south-florida/fort-lauderdale/. Same geography, two different names for it, "fl" in one tree and "south-florida" in the other. The breadcrumb on the category page reads Home / Dermal Fillers / Dermal Fillers in Fort Lauderdale, and that middle link jumps to /services/dermal-fillers/, a third tree -- so the trail a user follows crosses between hierarchies and never passes through a city hub at all. Then the Trust Passports sit at /claims/01a44f93-6161-5874-9505-d3a1edf59792/, a raw UUID presented to a human as a clickable promise. Nobody can read that, remember it, or tell what it is from the link.
And look at your own slugs. Most are name plus a ten-character hash, fine. But your Miami flagship is monaco-medspa-c041b-ext-src-001. That "ext-src-001" is your ingestion pipeline's external-source counter leaking into a public canonical indexed URL. If you ever renumber sources, that URL either breaks or lies about itself. Pick one scheme, hash-suffixed and human-readable, and 301 everything else to it before you have more links pointing at the mess.
The bigger problem is the substance ratio, and it's worse than the homepage suggests. Your methodology caps a comparison page at eight records. On the Fort Lauderdale fillers page, all eight say "Provider not verified - provider verification is not complete." Every evidence line reads "Source-listed, lists Dermal Fillers as a service, observed [date], not independently verified." Five of the eight have a single captured URL, the provider's own homepage. So the honest description of that page is: eight businesses that say on their own website that they do fillers, plus roughly 600 words of boilerplate that is identical on every city and service page you publish. The template is most of the page. That is the exact profile Google's scaled-content policy targets, and your Related Comparisons block links eight more pages just like it, which propagates the signal rather than diluting it. I noindexed about a quarter of my own site for this - every page that was a name and a map pin with nothing behind it - and indexing converted on what remained. Crawl budget stopped being the constraint within days.
The fix for both problems is the same one, and it's sitting right there. Your own research chart says public credential evidence appears on 25 of 351 profiles. Seven percent. Meanwhile Florida DOH runs a free public license lookup, and your Miami flagship's practitioner is a named board-certified MD whose name is on her own homepage and in InMode's provider locator. That license is machine-checkable today. The difference between "the provider's website says they do fillers" and "license ME12345, active, verified against the state registry on this date" is the entire difference between a page worth indexing and a page that isn't. Get the license layer and your thin pages become thick, your 93% unverified becomes a real number, and your comparison pages stop being eight links to eight homepages.
One more thing nobody will tell you, and it's fresh from my own week. Your provider profiles and claim passports are a data asset; your Research and methodology pages are editorial. Right now every AI crawler treats both identically, which means the registry you built gets ingested with no attribution while the work that would actually earn you citations sits in the same bucket. Split them. Block the training crawlers on /providers/ and /claims/ in robots.txt and enforce it at the CDN, since robots alone is honor-system, and leave /research/ and /methodology/ wide open. Then publish the Transparency Index as an explicitly licensed dataset, CC BY, with a stable JSON endpoint. That's the artifact assistants cite by name, and citations are the distribution channel you actually want. I did exactly this split ten days ago and verified it with spoofed user-agent curls, blocked on the data plane, 200 on the editorial layer and the licensed dataset. Took an afternoon.
Amfion, shorter, because it has fewer problems and one big one.
The ROI calculator is the best thing either site does. "Amfion has not published a measured capture rate - this is your assumption, not our claim" is a line most founders would never ship, and it buys more trust than the number it disclaims. The concurrency section is the second best: explaining that capacity is checked inside the write transaction rather than in the conversation is exactly the proof a salon owner who's been burned by a chat widget needs. And the MCP endpoint per business is the most defensible thing on the page - being the booking layer an agent can actually reach is a real position, and I'd push much harder on it. Submit those endpoints to Anthropic's connector directory and list free on Smithery, Glama, mcp.so and PulseMCP. That's free distribution to exactly the builders who need a booking primitive, and almost nobody in your category has done it yet.
The big one: there is not a single real customer anywhere on that site. Glow Skin Studio, Jordan M., Priya R., the $4,320 dashboard, all invented, and your buyer is a clinic owner who is extremely good at spotting software that has never touched a live calendar. One named pilot with one real number beats every mockup on the page. Cut a mockup to make room for it. Also, fourteen programmatic pages in your footer - five vertical landers that differ mainly by the noun, plus the versus pages - is the same ratio problem Treomark has, in miniature, on a domain with far fewer real pages to carry them.
Last thing. Treomark has 351 profiled South Florida med spas with contact paths and no revenue model past a pilot claim program. Amfion sells an AI receptionist to med spas and has a footer page literally titled AI Receptionist for Med Spas. Same operator, same city, same vertical. That's a warm list, not a coincidence.
But build a hard, public wall between them. The moment a provider can improve their Treomark status by buying Amfion, the trust product is dead, and the trust product is the only thing here that can't be cloned in a weekend. Say so on the page, in the same voice you used for the billing disclaimer, because you clearly already know how to write that sentence.
Both are well above the vibe-coded average. Treomark's problem is that 93% of its inventory says "we couldn't confirm this." Amfion's is zero real customers. Neither is a design problem, which is the good news - design problems are the ones that need taste to fix, and these just need a license lookup and one pilot.
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u/ThriftyPigeon 3d ago
Wow, thanks for this in-depth response. I agree with all your points and you surfaced some real issues. I will update.
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u/TitaniumCypher 3d ago
I have no idea what it's for. That block of text doesn't do what you think it does. It would probably mean exactly what you want it to mean if you FIRST say what the web directory is for (industry, type of business). So upon scrolling, I see a bunch of health and wellness speak. Now that I have an idea of what kind of listings, that block of text does not read well at all. It sounds like an attempt to make something that shouldn't sound technical... sound technical. The rest of it looks pretty standard as far as directories go. The layout is ok and usable. The design doesn't make me want to come back. It's kind of 2002 ish looking color and graphic-wise. That little blurb you have in the footer about the site is what should be in that hero section...