I built a Jev directory in one day. ~4,000 page views in the first 26 hours.

I built a directory of Jev use cases for TypeSafe's AI new model in one day. ~4,000 page views in the first 26 hours.

TL;DR
On September 15, TypeSafe AI released Jev, a new kind of AI model. Everyone asked the same question: "what do I build with this?"

On September 18, I shipped madewithjev.com, a directory of real Jev use cases. One day of work, no database, no backend beyond Stripe and GA4.

26 hours later: 186 builds listed, 3,979 page views, a pay-to-rank sponsor board, a $5 tool listing, and a free AI slop detector.

Below is how I built it, what didn't work, and what I would do differently.

The idea: answer the question under every launch post

Jev is strange. It can't write a sentence. You give it some text and a few questions, and it returns decisions: pick one of these options, give a score, yes or no. Each answer comes with a probability, in under half a second, for $0.042 per million input tokens.

The launch had great demos. TypeSafe showed Jev playing Doom. But under every post, on X and on Hacker News, people asked the same thing: "OK, but what is it for?"

There was no page that answered it. The builders were answering it one by one on X: a trading bot, an email triage script, a Postgres function. Nobody had put them in one place.

That's the whole idea. I didn't invent anything. I took a format that already works (the "made with X" directory) and pointed it at a trend on day three.

Day one

My git log tells the story better than I can:

~7:30 first commit

~8:00 first version of the directory: a few dozen builds, 8 categories

Midday submit form, mobile fixes, a live traffic counter in the header

Evening page-view stats, featured products, and the sponsor board

Next morning a Tools section, a free tools hub, and the AI slop detector

22 commits in about 24 hours. I built it with Claude Code. I write the plan and check the result; Claude writes most of the code.

The stack (boring on purpose)

Next.js, fully static. Every page is prerendered at build time. The whole directory is one TypeScript file with one entry per build.

No database for this MVP. Stripe is the ledger for the sponsor board: every payment carries its listing in the metadata, and the board is those payments added up.

GA4 for the traffic counter in the header (people online now and total views).

Vercel for hosting.

Total cost so far: a domain ($~20/year).

Every number is someone else's

One rule I set on day one: every build shows the cost and speed its author published, with a link to where they said it. I measure nothing.

This matters more than it sounds. The numbers are the best part of the site ("3,282 posts analysed for $0.13", "a browser task for $0.001"). But on Hacker News or Reddit, one wrong number and the thread is about your mistake, not your product. Saying "these are the author's claims, linked" up front removed that problem.

It also turned every builder into a distributor. When you list someone's project with their numbers and a link to their post, they have a reason to share it.

How it makes money (hopefully)

I don't like selling. I like it when people buy. So there is no media kit and no sales call.

1. A pay-to-rank sponsor board. I took the model from outbid.lol: rank is what you pay. The minimum is $5. The highest total is #1, and anyone can outbid you. The top three show on every build page and in the feed. No price list to decide, no negotiation.

2. Tool listings for $5. The Tools section lists apps and dev tools that run on Jev. Submitting a build is free; listing a product in Tools costs $5.

3. The directory itself stays free. It's the thing that brings the traffic.

Result so far: a cool project I've spent a day building.

A free tool as a distribution channel

On day two I built an AI Slop Detector on top of Jev. You paste a URL. A browser takes a screenshot, a vision model describes it, and Jev checks the page for 35 tells of AI-generated design and copy. The Jev step takes about 243 ms and costs $0.00015.

Two reasons to build it:

It's a demo of the thing the site is about. People who don't care about a directory care about their own slop score.

It's shareable. Every report has a link and a badge you can put in a footer. Each badge links back to the site.

What didn't work

Hacker News. A directory is a list, and HN doesn't allow lists as "Show HN". I posted it as a normal link. Then HN kept showing "You're posting too fast. Please slow down." for a long time. New or low-karma accounts get strict limits. Build karma before the day you need it.

eddit. There were almost no Jev threads to join. Every sub has its own rules: r/ClaudeAI and other subreddits rejected my posts. I'll try again soon.

Starting on day three. The launch threads on X and HN were on day one. I missed that wave of attention. If I had started on launch day, the directory would have been in those threads.

Traffic

3,979 page views in the first ~26 hours (from GA4, via the public counter on the site)

160+ people on the site at the same time at the peak (GA4 realtime)

LLM mentions: chatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are already mentioning madeiwthjev.com as a source for all JEV resources.

I'll post an update on whether it survives the end of the trend. Directories for a hot launch have a short half-life unless search traffic takes over. That's why every build has its own page, with its own title and description, and I wrote articles for Medium and dev.to targeting "Jev use cases".

Lessons, if you want to try this with the next launch

Watch for the question nobody answers. "What is it for?" under a launch post is a product.

Ship on day one, not day three. The launch threads are where the attention is, and they don't wait.

Build one free tool on the same tech. It gives people a reason to come back, and a reason to share.

If you've built something with Jev, you can submit it here. And if you've done a "directory for a trend" before, I'd like to know: did the search traffic ever show up after the hype?