The Story
Pontus and his co-founder Victor built Cursor Directory - a directory for Cursor AI rules and MCPs - in just 3 hours. It now makes $35K/month with 99.8% profit margins, 49,000 registered users, and 2.2 million unique visitors since launch. They only spend 3 hours per month maintaining it.
The idea came during a 3-hour flight to France. Pontus was watching tech videos about Cursor and discovered this common pattern about "rules" - but there was no central place to find them. You could Google and find obscure GitHub gists or forum posts, but no clear answer.
The moment he landed, Pontus called Victor: "We need to build this directory for Cursor rules." Within minutes, Victor spun up Figma to design while Pontus created the initial Next.js project with a hard-coded JSON file of rules he found online. In half an hour, they had something live on Vercel.
They bought the cursor.directory domain, completed the build in 3 hours, and posted it on X. It instantly took off - one post got 1 million impressions. They also hit the front page of Hacker News, and YouTubers started covering it.
The second wave came when MCPs (Model Context Protocol) launched - they quickly added MCP search functionality, which drove another huge adoption spike.
Key Insights
Why Directories Still Work in 2025
- •Directories solve a timeless problem: finding things you're interested in
- •In the AI world, people are looking for how to do things and find right answers
- •If you catch the wave at the right time and own the space, it's super powerful
- •Design is more important than ever - it's what sets you apart when everyone can build fast
The 3-Hour Build Process
- •Stick with tools you already know (Next.js, TypeScript, Vercel)
- •Start with hard-coded data, iterate from there
- •Having a co-founder with complementary skills (design + code) helps massively
- •Don't overthink - just ship and see what happens
Revenue Model
- •Featured listings for MCPs and rules (paid placement)
- •Job board for companies to post developer jobs
- •AI-generated custom Cursor rules (upload package.json, get tailored rules)
Design Philosophy
- •Keep it simple
- •Find websites you love and learn from them
- •Stay with a consistent design system
- •Design is the differentiator when AI makes building easy
Tech Stack
- •Next.js (fully TypeScript)
- •Shadcn components
- •Resend (email)
- •Open Panel (analytics)
- •Vercel (hosting)
- •Polar (payments - great for European companies)
- •Cursor (coding)
- •Notion (product management)
- •GitHub (version control, open source contributions)
- •Total cost: $525/month with 99.8% gross margin
Advice
- •Just start. When you commit to something, you create your own luck
- •Ship, share, and iterate - one thing leads to another
- •There's no such thing as failure when building - worst case, you learn
- •Find ideas by being dialed into what you're doing while staying aware of opportunities
Resources
- •Follow Pontus: https://x.com/pontusab
- •Cursor Directory: https://cursor.directory/