Niche Wordpress Directory in Munich

The Result (the good stuff first)

The directory has steadily grown to nearly 600 listings, with new businesses signing up every month. The feedback from both users and business owners has been overwhelmingly positive—they appreciate having a central, easy-to-use place to find and share English-speaking services. As the platform continues to expand, we’re focusing on refining the user experience, improving search functionality, and using real-world feedback to guide future updates.

The Problem

As American business-owners living in Germany, Eleanor Mayrhofer and I know that it’s often difficult to find English-speaking and foreign-owned businesses when in an online search dominated by German-speaking businesses. Which also means it’s difficult for those businesses to be found. There are many online communities where people post recommendations but they get lost in the feeds and comments. We wanted to create a place where anyone can easily find this information, making it easier to connect with the businesses.

The Approach

From Softr to Wordpress
We knew an online directory was what needed to be made. Eleanor worked on the branding and structure while I built our MVP—using Softr to build the site and Airtable as our database. Once we validated our idea we researched many different ways to build a directory and decided to setup the site in Wordpress with Geodirectory so that we could integrate Eleanor’s podcast and have a blog.

Custom Theme
I created a child theme from Blocksy and styled it with CSS according to Eleanor’s final design.

Harnessing AI and Python to Grow Our Listings
To allow listings to be submitted to the directory by users, I integrated an online form. But to ramp things up in the beginning we manually input a list of businesses vetted by us. Eventually using AI and Python to scrape Google Places for English-Speaking small businesses that we could comb through and select from, I was able to bulk up our directory in a more efficient way.