Shadowing Practice: AI Made the Most Passive Side Hustle Even Easier - Learn English Speaking with Video

Some businesses were here before AI and they're  going to be here long after AI. And one of those is a boring old directory site. And if you don't  know what a directory site is, they're sites that look like this or this or even ugly ones like  this. I'm going to build one of these today using an AI tool that will pit a bunch of AI  models against each other so I can be sure that I'm getting the best one. Not just that, but I'm  going to ask the AI tool, which type of directory should I even build? because I don't know what  type of directory is the most likely to get a lot of traffic, therefore make me a lot of money. I'm  going to use this tool to do all of that. It used to take a developer months worth of work, even to  build a simple directory website, but today we can do that in minutes. And believe it or not, there  are still a zillion directory opportunities out there because there's so many niches that people  aren't even thinking about. What I love about directories is that once they're built, they're  quite passive. They basically run themselves.

You can monetize with ads, subscriptions, or you  can collect leads organically and sell them to the businesses that are listed on the directory site.  But enough talking. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to build one live, share my screen,  show you the prompts, show you how to do it, connect payments, and publish it to the internet  all throughout the course of this video.

So, to start, we're going to go to this website  right here, chatlm.abacus.ai. This is the tool that enables us to use all the different models  in one chat interface. and even make them compete against each other so we can be sure to get  the best output. The link to this is in the description, by the way. So, we're talking chat  GPT 5.6, Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5, Grock, DeepSeek, and a bunch of other models you've probably never  heard of. And we can access any of them just by hitting this dropown, going to chat, and then we  go to this dropown and picking the one that we prefer. Or we just pick route LLM, and that will  automatically make all of them compete against each other and just give us the best possible  output. Now, if we want this tool to be an AI agent to go out and use these models and actually  do stuff for us, then we're just going to hit this dropown and click agent. And it costs about 10  bucks a month, which is less than what any of these individual tools would charge you for the  same pro models that you get right here. Okay, but we're going to start with the old standby,  which is chat GPT 5.6. Boom. Right there. Here's my prompt. What's an underserved local directory  niche I could build and monetize? Give me one specific niche, who pays for it, and how it  makes money. Okay, super fast. commercial kitchen equipment repair directory. Not anything  I would ever think of, but for some reason, Chad GBT is seeing signals out there that tells it  that this is an underserved niche directory idea, but we're not content with this. We're going to  give it the same prompt. We're going to paste it. We're going to go Opus 4.8, which is one of  my favorites right now. Same prompt. Hit enter.

Estate cleanout and senior downsizing directory.  Never would have thought of that either. Now, let's go to my least favorite model right now.  Sorry, Google. Gemini 3.5. Same prompt. Hit enter and remember how I feel about these ideas  doesn't really mean anything. I haven't done enough research to know which of these three ideas  is the best. Okay. Gemini says aging in place and accessibility home modification directory. Another  very random one I never would have thought of. So commercial kitchen equipment from Claude. Claude  thinks this niche is attractive because it avoids the crowded generic local business directory.  That is true. Oops, sorry that was Chat GBT that said that. And Claude thinks the estate cleanout  directory is underserved because people that are searching for this tool are grieving, overwhelmed,  and time pressed, and they want a trusted short list not to vet 15 different companies. All  right, I like that. And then Gemini thinks that aging in place as a directory is underserved  because well, it didn't it didn't tell me why. So call it confirmation bias, but telling you I  don't really like Gemini. But hey, if it wins, it wins. Okay, let's pick a winner. So, we've got  one B2B directory, businessto business. That one's from Chad GPT. Commercial kitchen equipment repair  directory. It's not going to be consumer searching for that. So, I like that because it's higher  dollar value. You can usually make more money in business to business businesses, but it's also  harder to get traction there. It's harder to break through to a decision maker. That's the trade-off  that you make. And the other two directory ideas are consumer ideas. These are just individuals,  normal civilians, searching for these things, which typically make less money, but it's easier  to break through to consumers. There's no decision maker. You're talking directly to the person  that will be paying you. Okay? Call it bias, doesn't matter. I really like this estate  cleanout and senior downsizing directory the most. Maybe because I just have a good friend  that's making a lot of money going to estates and basically selling all the leftovers. So, an  estate sale will happen and there's always a bunch of stuff left over. and he will go in like  the day after it ends and say, "Hey, you know, all this stuff left over, I'll give you 200 bucks  for it." And usually they're just happy to get rid of it because what are they going to do with  it? They're going to have to list it individually on Facebook Marketplace. That's his whole niche  and he makes a lot of money doing it. He travels around the country doing that. So, we're all  biased creatures. I know that this is growing like crazy. There are 10,000 baby boomers retiring  every single day and their kids, their millennial kids like me, need to sell their parents stuff as  they unfortunately move on to the next life. So, I like Claude. I have a friend that's doing  this and I like selling to consumers more than businesses. But let's do one more step. I'm  going to go to trends.google.com. I'm just going to search for the phrase estate sale over the last  5 years. Okay, let's go 2004 to present. Okay, so it dropped from 2004 until about 2024 for some  reason. And now it's heading back up. I don't know why it would have been dropping. That's kind of  an interesting phenomenon that I didn't expect, but it's going back up. So, I like that. But while  we're pitting these models against each other, let's put Google Trends terms, search terms  against each other as well, side by side by side, so we can see what the demand shows on the search  side of things. Right here, I'm going to type in a much, much, much more niche term, commercial  kitchen equipment repair. Of course, there's a ton more people searching for the term estate  sale than commercial kitchen equipment repair, but we're still going to get an accurate view  of how all three of these terms are trending.

So you can see this is basically not moving the  needle at all. There's very very few companies searching for this term. So it's probably not fair  to compare these against each other. Let's just search equipment repair. Okay, so that's trending  upwards. The red line right there. And then over here we're going to search aging in place. All  right, let's go ahead and delete the term estate sale so we can get a more accurate view of this.  So equipment repair is booming, but this could be heavy equipment repair. It could be anything.  But clearly, these two terms are both growing more than estate sale. But of course, it's not really  fair to do estate sale because we're not looking for people that are searching for an estate sale.  We're looking for people that are about to host an estate sale. So, I just searched for the term  how to host an estate sale. And the search volume basically went from nothing to 100 over the last  month or two. And if you search host estate sale, it looks the same. So, I realized I just went  back to the actual output from the prompt and we're talking about estate cleanout help. So, when  I searched for the phrase estate cleanout, it is the best looking chart that I've seen thus far  in all of the estate categories. Like, it's just looking really, really spicy right now. So, we're  going to stick with estates. So, here's my prompt now. Compile 20 real estate cleanout businesses in  the greater Dallas Fort Worth area. For each one, give the business name, category, phone, and a  oneline description. Put it all in a table. Now, very important that on this one I choose route  LLM because it's going to choose the best model to do the heavy lifting because this prompt is is a  much heavier prompt for lack of a better word than the ones that we had just done. Boom. Okay, so it  looks like we've got some junk removal businesses, some cleanout businesses, most the junk removal  businesses because honestly, how many like estate cleanout businesses are out there? Which, by the  way, that's probably a really good business. It's kind of like what my friend's doing. I mean,  it only got 11 or 12. 11 and I asked for 20.

So what's cool here is you can see the thinking  that it did and then you can regenerate the output to this prompt using whatever model you want. So  I'm going to have it regenerate it with cloud opus 4.8 cuz it's my favorite. Quick note on this, you  want to fact check all of these listings before we publish them on a directory website. I love  getting an output from a model and then using a different model that's unbiased to fact check  everything in that output. Right? In other words, is the phone number for this junk removal business  accurate or the address or the website, etc. So, Claude wins again. I actually got 20 results this  time because I regenerated with Claude. I'm going to do a control find for the word clean out the  noncleout commercial care. Okay, estate pros. Not only did I get 20 this time, but they seem to be  more relevant because come on, Dallas Fort Worth has 8 million people. Surely there are 20 relevant  businesses that do something like this. And what's cool is even if we get abacus to regenerate the  output, we don't lose the original one because I still want to see what chat GPT 5.5 can do  here, but if you just click these arrow buttons, you can see all of the different regenerations.  So, let's go ahead and see what GPT 5.5 can do.

And then just for fun, let's see what Fable 5 can  do, cuz that's the best right now in my opinion. I just realized my prompt does something stupid. 20  real estate cleanout businesses. That is different than like an estate sale cleanout business. I  meant to say 20 real estate. So, I'm going to redo this al together and I I will probably get  a better output. Remember, when it comes to AI, garbage in equals garbage out. And I'm make  mistakes here just like anyone else. And we don't edit those out. Remember, I can still use the  output from these other prompts even if it had a bad input because there are still good businesses  in those tables. But I'm going to go ahead and give it a better prompt that says compile 20 real  businesses that do estate sale cleanouts in the greater Dallas Fororth area. And the rest is the  same. So, we're going to do that with route LLM to see which model it uses. Side note, I'm not  sure if you've heard the phrase token maxing, right? But you should do that. It's basically  using uh AI models that are way more powerful than what you need done, right? You want a restaurant  for date night, use Fable 5. Why not? If you're paying for Fable 5, use the heck out of it for no  other reason. So you can better learn these models and like the nuances of them and how to prompt  them and what their outputs look like as compared to other models until you get to the point where  you're hitting your limits regularly. Token max the heck out of these models. Okay, here's my  output here. We've got 20 results this time.

DFW. I want to see what Fable 5 can do. So I'm  going to put the same prompt there and then choose Fable 5 from the drop down instead of Route LLM.  But I really like what Route LLM gave me here.

This is making me realize that there there is a  big opportunity for these estate sale cleanout businesses. Most people aren't going to think  to hire a junk removal business. They hear junk removal and they think hoarder. My mother's not  a hoarder. My grandmother's not a hoarder. Like they almost might find it disrespectful to hire a  junk removal business to get rid of those last few things that didn't sell from her estate sale. They  might be china cabinets. They might be valuable.

They might have been impeccably maintained over  the last century. So, we don't think to go to junk removal. It's not junk. it's their prized  possessions, right? So, the naming of a business really, really matters how you position yourself.  And if you call yourself the estate cleanout pros, then you're probably not going to get many calls  for a hoarder house, a drunk removal house. You're going to lose that. But the trade-off is that you  are going to be known as the guy or the gal for estate sale cleanouts. And what's better about  the estate sale cleanout business? I know this video is supposed to be about directories, but  we're going to tangent just for a minute because the ADHD is flaring and we we give into that.  What's better about an estate sale cleanout business than a junk removal business is that  you get more stuff that you can sell, right?

Which is what a lot of junk removal businesses  to do to make a lot of their profit. They get a bunch of stuff that's like, "Huh, we're not taking  this to the dump. We're selling this on Facebook Marketplace." They make a ton of money doing that.  But in the estate sale cleanout business, that's mostly what you get. Stuff that you can resell.  So, you're getting paid, not getting it for free, but you are getting paid to take things that you  can sell. That's called a negative cost of goods sold big business or a negative COGS business and  it's a beautiful beautiful thing. You're getting paid to get paid but we're here for directories  passive business not active sorry. Okay so here was the route LLM output. Here's the fable 5  output. If you do a control find for the word estate look at the Fable 5 output. Okay. And let's  just look at the business name. One, two, three.

It's pretty clear that there are more results  tied directly to estate sales and not junk removal because look, state liquidators, rare find estate  sales. Actually, I take that back. The outputs look pretty similar. I'd be curious if route  LLM used Fable 5 on its output as well. Okay, so we've got plenty to work with. Now, we want  to use an AI agent to do the heavy lifting for us cuz we don't know how to do the heavy lifting  in this case. No pun intended. Estate sales, China cabinets. Sorry, it was dumb. Okay, we're  going to go back to Abacus. We're going to hit this purple button. We're going to hit this  dropown. go from chat to agent. But wait, we've got to get that table to give it to it.  We're going to go back here. We'll use Fable 5.

And we just click this little download button in  the top right. That's it. We don't need to prompt it again. Okay, we got agent. Here's our prompt.  Build a directory website that lists estate sale cleanout businesses. Include a searchable  homepage, category pages, and individual listing pages with a photo, description, and contact  info. Prefill it with the list I attached. Add a paid featured listing upgrade with a Stripe so  a business can pay 30 bucks a month to appear at the top. Okay, we've got agent. We're going to hit  the plus button. Upload from computer. Get the CSV that I just downloaded from the other chat window  and hit enter. I'll get started on building that directory website for you right away. This is the  part that used to take a developer weeks or even months. And we could do like a DFW directory  for state sales, but what the heck? Let's go nationwide. If after a few months we see that  a lot of these uh searches are coming from the DFW area, then we can always spend 10 bucks, buy  another domain name, put the letters DFW in there, and make this more niche down. I don't think  there's a need for that. I think this is already so niche that we want to go more broad on their  geography, right? If the industry is very niche, then the geography should be more broad. If  the geography is very broad, like for instance, a small neighborhood in Dallas or a small suburb  of Dallas, then the industry should be more broad, right? But some industries and or geographies have  enough search demand to where you can go niche on both. I just don't think estate sale cleanouts is  one of them. So, the agent has a few questions for me. So, I'm going to put one, the name is going  to be estate cleanout pros. Two, should businesses be able to submit their own listing? Yes. Three,  categories. Are there specific categories you'd like to organize listings by? Infer from the data.  Four, when a business pays for featured listings, where should payment confirmation emails be  sent? Now, that's one I like to answer. I'll put in my email here. Five, color scheme. Let's  do clean and minimal. And I like that it gave me the option to just say go ahead and it would guess  all five of my answers for these. But it only took me about a minute to give it those answers. Okay.  Now, it needs Stripe API credentials from me. And if you don't know what that means, it basically  just means it needs to know how to talk to my Stripe account so I can accept money, which is the  most important part of this whole endeavor. So, it gives me instructions on how to find that.  Thankfully, I've done this a zillion times.

I'll show you how to do that. And then it just  needs my secret key. So, log into my Stripe account. It takes 30 seconds to create this.  I'm going to go to the search bar and do API keys. I'm going to hit this plus button, create  secret key. powering an integration you built.

I'm going to use my touchpad. I'm going to name  it estate cleanout pros. Okay, there's my key.

That's my secret key. And this is my publishable  key. We're going to go there. Submit. And voila, we have payments connected. Okay, that's done.  Now it's actually building the website. All right, I'll build this full feature directory website  step by step. Let me start by reading the CSV data in the style guide. Okay, so if we wanted to  really scale this, we need a lot more directory businesses because this is only DFW. So to do  that, we go back to Abacus. I personally, you can do whatever you want, would choose Fable 5 because  that's the one that just will do the most work and it will work the longest to get you the output  that you really need. And I would just basically give it the same prompt and just say nationwide.  And then even tell it specifically there should be over a thousand listings here. Sometimes you  need to tell the model how hard it needs to work because it's always going to default for less work  because it doesn't want us to be token maxing. It wants the company wants to save money, right? And  the more we token max, the less money. Anthropic, Chad, Gemini, whoever makes, but they're funded  by VCs. They're trillion dollar companies. They're doing fine. A lot of stuff going on here that I  don't understand, but I know that when it's done, I just need to click this button up here on  the top right. Deploy. It's generating all the images for the site right now. You couldn't  pay me to understand what Ubuntu sandbox means.

Ubuntu sounds like a Mongolian appetizer or  something. Oh, okay. We got some pictures here, some good images. Okay, we're done. The web  app is ready. Let's see how it looks. Okay, estate cleanout pros. Get featured. Submit  listing. We've got a search bar right here. Okay, we've got filter buttons here. Click on that.  Boom. Filter buttons work great. Submit free listing. Get featured. Cool. All right. And then  this is the Stripe integration that we're looking at live. That seems to work. Loads really fast.  It's responsive. If we want to see how it looks on mobile, looks great. Presentation view, desktop,  etc. Cool. Go to the search bar. Just do junk.

Let's go ahead and click deploy. We'll put it on  an abacus domain name for now. Boom. Done. Okay.

So, if we want to see how it looks on the actual  internet, we can go here and we'll type /admin.

Then it gave us a password to enter. And then  here's what it looks like on the back end. We can see how many um listings there are, how many  featured, how many are pending to be featured, and there's only 20 cuz we only gave it 20, but it  would upload as many as we gave it. Now, let's add some more images to this because the ones it gave  me are decent, but I want some better ones. Okay, we're going to go click on image up here  at the top and take the URL and say make a hero image for this site because if you need  images for your site or for ads or whatever, it's built right here into Abacus. So, we can have  it choose the model for us, but I love GPT Image 2. I think it's the best image model on the market  right now. So, I'm going to purposely give it a very light prompt because I want to see how well  it thinks. Okay, let's talk about how this website and other directory websites like it can actually  make us money. Number one, featured positioning, featured placements of the businesses that we list  on the directory. We're listing these businesses on the directory without their permission.  We don't need to ask their permission because we're doing them a favor and we'll leave it on our  website forever for free. They only need to pay if they want a higher placement and it only really  makes sense for them to pay for higher placement once they're actually getting some leads and some  traffic from our website. Another way we can make money here is just by banner ads. Now, this is  probably the lowest friction, most passive way of making money on most websites, but it's also  like the lowest and worst use of these clicks, of this valuable attention that we're able to  garner here. So, that's the trade-off you're making. Another thing we can do is just kind of  collect leads from consumers that needed an estate sale cleanout, and they can all go to us directly  instead of to the businesses in the directory. And then we can reach out to the businesses in the  directory and sell them to the highest bidder.

We could literally email all of them at the same  time and say, "Hey, I have this lead. It's in this neighborhood. We think it's worth this much. Who  wants it?" And just let the bidding begin. I think directories are going to be more important than  ever with the advent of AI because it needs more good, knowledgeable, wellorganized sources to  pull from, and a directory is a super efficient way of getting that done. Okay. Uh, it looks like  it created a polished hero image that matches the look and feel. I like how the colors match. Looks  good. Cool. We can add that right to the website.

Now, if we wanted to make a video, that's just  as easy as an image. And you can choose the model that it uses, cling, seed, dance, etc.  We don't really need to do that right now. A pitch deck. If we wanted to raise money for this,  you could do that with a couple clicks. Slides.

You just choose that little connector right  there. You can invite teammates to collaborate on these projects with you. Think about it.  If you paid for all of these premium models, it cost between 20 and $200 a month for them each.  But Abacus is only 10 bucks a month total for usage of all of these combined. If you want to use  Chat LLM by Abacus AI, check out the link in my description. They support the channel. I use them.  They're awesome. Go build something today. Not next week. Today. There's never been a better time  in the whole history of this wonderful universe.