Build idea · Intermediate
A community directory
The Yellow Pages for a community that deserves better than a Google Sheet.
A searchable, filterable directory for a niche community — think local ceramic studios, indie TTRPG designers, or Rust job boards. The core feature is a submit-then-approve pipeline: anyone can propose a listing through a public form, it lands in a moderation queue, and an admin approves or rejects it before it goes live. Everything hangs off Postgres full-text search and tag filtering, so the whole thing runs on one database with no separate search service.
What you'll learn
- →Modeling many-to-many data (listings to tags/categories) and querying it cleanly with an ORM instead of raw SQL string-building
- →Doing real search — full-text ranking plus tag/location filters — directly in Postgres, so you learn where a dedicated search service is and isn't worth it
- →Building a submit-then-approve moderation workflow with role-gated routes, the pattern behind almost every UGC product
- →Handling user image uploads: storage, validation, and serving optimized thumbnails without blowing up your bandwidth
Take it further
- +Add a 'claim your listing' flow so business owners can verify ownership (email match) and edit their own entry directly
- +Introduce featured/promoted listings paid through Stripe Checkout — a real revenue model and a clean excuse to learn webhooks
- +Ship a weekly 'new this week' digest email via Resend on a Vercel Cron job, pulling everything approved in the last 7 days