---
title: "Collect original data for AI-built directories | Ian Nuttall"
description: "Importance of human work in AI projects"
canonical: "https://ian.is/post/original-directory-data"
language: "en"
---

# Collect original data for AI-built directories

Apr 2025 / 14,482 views / [via X](https://x.com/iannuttall/status/1913165842507854182)

I built a directory of beaches in manus in just two prompts

it's ridiculous, BUT here's why \*you\* are more important than ever:

it still relies on crawling the web and on other sites to provide the data.

for an MVP of a directory, or pseo site, or saas etc that's fine. it's never been easier to whip up that idea in minutes

but if you want long term success you need to be the source and not the fork - and that only comes from doing stuff ai can't replicate (yet)

all of the data from this site was crawled from elsewhere. is it accurate? how often is it updated? what if those sources change?

when it becomes so easy to do things like build a directory or vibe code a saas, doing the hard things is more important than ever

i have another app in this niche that has around 10,000 monthly active users

it's been going for years and years at this point on autopilot

i did it by painstakingly parsing time series of sea temperature data from the us government with a bot that runs 4x a day - no ai 😭

(currently has 63.4m rows of data)

this site is the source for manus and other tools and is very accurate.

I've had many opportunities to sell the data into bigger companies and none of that would be possible taking the easy route

anyway: tldr manus is amazing but humans working on the hard problems with ai as a copilot is still the way you win

Video from the original post

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