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Fifteen years of boring healthcare directories monetised by one sponsored hotline number — about $350K a year after tax, split three ways, with no employees
yourfirststep.org went from $20K/month to zero in 2018, was rebuilt, and he describes the site as capable of making and losing roughly $50,000 a month inside a day · Stodzy, the marketing agency the directories fed, was doing $2 million a year and was recently acquired · Sober Nation has around 1 million Facebook followers
Asked how he vets a niche: "I only care about one thing and it's do rich people do it and that's really it." The money isn't in the sponsored listings — it's in the single hotline number at the top of the page.
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Tim Stoddard grew up in Philadelphia with what he calls a terrible drug problem, moved to South Florida to detox on a cousin's couch for three months, and six months sober started writing a blog on Blogspot because Seth Godin's advice was to start a blog and he didn't know what else to do. The directory idea came from a friend working a sales floor selling advertising into little magazines distributed to country clubs. The friend's prospecting method was to look up a country club and then find the local businesses around it. Tim's version: "what if we just built a directory of treatment centers. We didn't really think about it too much." That became Sober Nation, roughly fifteen years ago. He is unusually honest about how badly it went: "What Sober Nation really did is in a lot of ways it's like my least successful thing that I've ever created because it was just so much bashing my head against the wall and so much frustration." The core confusion was identity — "the headache was not understanding what I was. I didn't know if I was just a technical SEO directory or if I was a media company that kind of had a directory attached to it." He rebuilt the site at one point and calls it a terrible mistake that crushed the SEO. But it worked as a sandbox. Once he had proof of concept he spun off a network of lead-gen directories, mostly in behavioural health, under the name Recovery Local. Inbound enquiries from Sober Nation then forced a second business into existence: Stodzy, a marketing agency, which he sold recently. He is now building new directories in the same style — a stem cell clinic directory (Stem Cell Authority, a domain he owns from a project he previously shut down), an autism therapy agency directory, and Plant Retreats, a directory of psychedelic retreats he launched two weeks before the interview. His summary of the model: "a really really simple and streamlined model that has a ton of upside in exchange for not a ton of risk."
The idea came off a friend's sales floor. They sold advertising into little magazines distributed to country clubs and prospected by looking up a club and then the businesses around it: "what if we just built a directory of treatment centers.
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Data credibility: A long-form founder interview on Frey Chu's channel with Ahrefs pulled up on screen for parts of it, which makes the traffic collapses partially observable rather than purely asserted. The revenue figures are all self-reported and unaudited: about $350,000 a year personally after taxes from the Recovery Local network, three people on the directories, "easily a couple million a year" for the Stodzy agency before it was acquired, the yourfirststep.org swing described as making and losing roughly $50,000 a month within a day, and around 1 million Facebook followers on Sober Nation. Note carefully that the $350K is his personal after-tax take rather than network revenue, and that no per-site revenue is broken out anywhere. The Stodzy acquisition price is never disclosed. Peak Sober Nation revenue is described only qualitatively — he says it is "definitely not what it was in its heyday." The traffic declines are corroborated by the Ahrefs charts both men are looking at; the dollar figures attached to them are his. He also has a commercial interest in directories being appealing: he sells a course and runs a membership community about building them, and is building an AI directory-builder product with a partner named Chase, all mentioned in the same conversation.
The first money was banner advertising, because that is what websites did fifteen years ago. "At first it was advertising because what else did you do on websites at the time other than sell advertising and then it was like licensing deals and then being like featured facilities in the directory.
Two things turned a single site into a network. The first is that he solved the demand side once and never again: "the hardest part of the lead gen business by far, especially if it's a national lead gen business, is finding different buyers to buy calls in different parts of the country."
He describes the site that started all of it as a failure: "in a lot of ways it's like my least successful thing that I've ever created because it was just so much bashing my head against the wall and so much frustration." The cause was identity rather than traffic — "the headache was not understanding what I was.
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