Side Project

Hey everyone! I am excited to share my online directory & community side project for craft breweries, breweriesnearby.com. Despite barely touching this project since launching in June 2023, this site has received 1.4 million impressions on Google and 20k organic visitors. The site's ranking on page 1 for “breweries {city}” keywords in cities like Toronto, Seattle, & Vancouver - sometimes even ahead of Yelp & Tripadvisor.

I built this for fun using no-code tools as a way of learning programmatic SEO. In case you don’t know, programmatic SEO is a method of generating 1000s of pages of website content from data in a database or spreadsheet. The oversimplified version of how this was built is the following:

• Scraped a public directory for breweries using Octoparse
• Structured the scraped data in an Airtable base
• Built a CMS site in Webflow with a matching CMS data structure to the Airtable base
• Synced data from Airtable to Webflow’s CMS through Whalesync

Other tools that have greatly helped with the site’s passive growth are Supersparks for creating a reviews community, and Finsweet Attributes for on page filtering of breweries.

Similar to what I did for Breweries Nearby, there is a trend of creators unbundling keyword niches from Yelp or Tripadvisor and then building directory sites with design, features, data, and content that better serves the niche. So if you are looking for a side project idea that can grow passively, there is a great opportunity here :).

I would love to hear any ideas or feedback you might have for improving / growing / monetizing this. Or if anyone wants to partner up, I am all ears! :)

For a more detailed explanation of how this was built, here and here are a few additional resources.