A Local Niche Site Strategy

I’m experimenting with building a handful of small, local websites to see if they can spin off a bit of cash.

The bet is that local niches are underserved. Wedding suppliers in one county, tradespeople in one town, jobs in one region. A lot of people search for these things, and most of the results are, irrelevant, spammy, or otherwise generally enshitified. A small, tidy site that’s accurate, simple, and exactly what you’re looking for should have an edge.

So i’m going to pick a couple of narrow, location-specific niches, spend two or three days building a clean site that actually helps people, and try to get them to $50–100 MRR without too much fuss.

I probably wouldn’t try this if it weren’t for PocketBase. PocketBase makes building a backend trivially easy: auth, collections, admin UI, file uploads, and basic APIs come out of the box. I don’t have to design a schema from scratch or wire up a ton of services just to store a few records and handle some forms.

The frontends are just HTML pages with web-standard CSS and web components, living in /public and served straight from the same PocketBase instance on a $5/month VPS. It’s one binary, one server, one deploy.

No frameworks, no builds, no stacks. Just fast pages, simple forms, and enough backend to manage content and submissions.

I figure in the best-case scenario I get some walking-around money. The sites are fast to build, inexpensive to leave running, and every site can teach me something about what people actually click, search, and pay for which feels like a good trade.