Zenarion
Find authentic Thai massage in Switzerland.
A few weeks ago I started building Zenarion (zenarion.ch) — an online
directory for one very specific niche: Thai-massage studios in Switzerland.
Free, four languages (DE/FR/IT/EN), with listings, prices and reviews. ~565
studios are already in it.
I'm a solo developer with a day job, and I built most of it with AI on nights
and weekends. A few years ago I don't think one person could've shipped
something this complete — full directory, claim flow, reviews, multilingual
SEO. That part still feels a little unreal.
Here's my problem: the build was the easy part. Getting the first users is
brutal.
The flywheel needs studio owners to "claim" their free listing — add photos,
hours, reply to reviews. That's what makes the directory come alive and feeds
the SEO. But this audience is genuinely hard to reach:
- Small businesses, often not very online, sometimes a language barrier.
- Wary of anything that looks like a sales pitch or a scam.
- Not on Twitter, Indie Hackers or Product Hunt — and many don't check email.
So far: ~15 honest, no-pressure cold emails ("your studio is already listed
for free, here's the link") and a couple of Instagram DMs. Result: a few
opens, zero replies. I know that's a tiny sample, but solo, it stings.
SEO is a slow, steady climb (~100 search clicks over 3 months on Google +
Bing, trending up), but that's a long game.
My question for anyone who's cracked this: how do you cold-start the SUPPLY
side of a niche directory when your users aren't on the usual founder
channels — especially a wary, offline-ish, small-business audience?
I'm a quiet builder, so tactics that aren't "cold-call 100 people a day" are
especially welcome 🙂 Happy to share more about the build if it helps.
3 Comments
I’d be careful with one thing.
The hardest part usually isn’t reaching users.
It’s deciding what “activation” actually looks like for a supply-side marketplace like this before you scale any outreach.
That decision tends to shape everything that follows — who you contact, what you say, and what you treat as traction.
I wouldn’t try to unpack that casually in a thread.
If useful, drop your email and I’ll put together the tighter version.
Appreciate it — but I see that exact "drop your email" line on a lot of your replies, across very different posts in very short time 😄 So I'll pass on email; if there's a specific take, post it here and we all learn.
Fair point.
I get why it reads that way.
No worries.