From shared hosting to a platform I own end to end.

Darras Index is a genuinely localcommunity directory — every business on it is local to the area. It's a searchable index of roughly 1,885 businesses across 12 categories, with reviews, a job board, and a self-service portal where owners claim and manage their listing.

The model is simple: populate the directory automatically, then earn revenue by charging businesses for premium listings. Discovery and outreach are automated so the directory grows on its own and owners are invited in.

The site began as a proof-of-concept built on a CMS and hosted on shared hosting. The vision — a fully custom local directory — was something the CMS simply couldn't deliver, so in mid-2025 I came on board to rebuild it properly.

The hosting situation made the move urgent. We hit real instability — outages, a deleted repository, and email deliverability problems: because campaigns were sending from an IP shared with other tenants, our marketing was landing in spam. We parted ways with the original provider, and by November 2025 I had rebuilt the product and migrated everything onto a custom, containerised stack on Azure that we fully control.

That experience is exactly why the platform is now architected for ownership and resilience: our own infrastructure, our own repositories and CI/CD, our own sending reputation — nothing critical sitting in someone else's shared pool.

Rather than enter businesses by hand, a scheduled pipeline does it. Every day a containerised scraper runs a fresh location-based search, discovers businesses from several data sources, enriches each record from multiple data points, and deduplicates non-destructively across providers. It then calls our API to insert the business, fire the outreach email, and add the lead to our CRM — directory populated, owner invited, all in one run.

Owners receive a one-time, signed link (sent via Resend) to claim their listing; claiming bridges a Clerk login to a business-scoped JWT so they can manage their profile and upgrade. On top of that, growth runs through Resend marketing emails — hitting up to a ~40% open rate — and social campaigns built around short-form video.

Bulk-email and tiered job-notification jobs run as background workers inside the API, so outreach and notifications scale without manual effort.

I'm the sole engineer and a co-owner. That means I've owned every element of IT here: dealing with providers, planning and executing the migration, designing the architecture, making the infrastructure and build-vs-buy calls, and organising and prioritising the backlog so the most valuable work ships first.

A constant theme is cost discipline — deliberately reaching for free and low-cost tools while we grow, and automating anything repetitive so a one-person tech team can run a platform that discovers businesses, onboards owners and markets itself with very little manual overhead.