How to build a startup directory website with v0

Rule of thumb: if you want a directory this week and do not care whose software it runs on, rent one. Brilliant Directories or eDirectory will have you live before this guide is finished. If the directory is the product, or the thing that brings people to your newsletter, your fund or your community, the shelf is worth owning, because the meters above are exactly where a growing directory pays and a curated list of companies with their rounds is an asset you should be able to move, export and redesign at will. The honest middle case is a directory whose value is somebody else’s data. There the answer is a subscription, because you may read Dealroom’s rounds and you may not republish them.

* On this template the free-tier lines to watch are images and the pause. The free plan includes 1 GB of file storage, and a cover or gallery image may be up to 10 MB, so a directory with a few hundred companies and their pictures reaches it. It also pauses a project after a week without activity, and a directory nobody edits for a week is normal. Pro, from $25/mo, lifts storage to 100 GB, ends the pause and keeps a daily backup for 7 days, with spend caps on by default.

Prices and rates from supabase.com, developex.com, v0.app, v0.app and vercel.com, checked September 2026.

The database step is the one worth not skipping once your screens need real data. Everything else here takes a couple of minutes, and after that you’re just describing what you want.

1. 01

   Generate the directory before anything else exists

   Start with the screen visitors live on. Placeholder companies are fine, and finding out the card layout is wrong now costs nothing.

   PromptSketch the directoryCopy

   Build the public screens for a startup directory: a grid of company cards with a logo, name, one-line description, category, funding stage and total raised, a filter sidebar with search, categories, funding stages, a minimum and maximum amount raised and a location field, a sort menu and a result count with a clear-all button. A company page with the full description, links and a list of funding rounds. A news list with a featured image, title, category and date per story, and an article page. A funding page listing rounds with company, stage, amount, date and investors, filterable by stage and amount. Use placeholder content for now. I will add the real database next.

   Placeholder data is fine here, and only here. Everything after this step gets something real behind it.

2. 02

   Start a new chat for the database, the publish rule and the routes

   This is the step that turns a convincing mock-up into a directory. The publish rule goes into the database here, before any admin exists, so the screens can only ever read what is published.

   PromptConnect a database and design the modelCopy

   In this chat, connect a Supabase database and create the tables and the API routes behind them. Categories and tags with a name and slug. Startups with name, slug, short and long descriptions, a category, a funding stage from a fixed list (Seed, Series A through Series E+, IPO, Grant, Acquisition), a published or unpublished status defaulting to unpublished, an archived flag, logo and cover addresses, a gallery, team size, city and country, links, and total and latest funding columns. A startup_tags join table and a social links table. Funding rounds with stage, amount, date, lead investor, co-investors, valuations and notes, and a trigger that recalculates the startup’s total and latest raise on every change. Articles with title, slug, body, featured image, category, author, status and published date, and a news_tags join table. Turn on row-level security with the public half of the rules: anyone may read categories and tags, a published and unarchived startup with its rounds and links, and a published article. Make the directory, company, news and funding screens read real data through the routes, seed three companies with a round each, leave one unpublished, and show me that the directory lists two.

   Ask for the routes alongside the tables. A schema with nothing reading it leaves the directory exactly as fake as it was.

3. 03

   Add auth and roles, checked on the server and in the database

   Two layers, same rule. A route check is the first line, row-level security is the second, and it is the one that still holds when a route forgets to filter.

   PromptAdd auth, roles and the admin rulesCopy

   Add authentication with email and password: a sign-in screen, logout and a session, and no public sign-up screen. Add a user_roles table with admin and viewer roles, a database function that checks a role, and a trigger that gives every new account a profile row and the viewer role. Every API route that writes must check on the server that the caller is a signed-in admin rather than trusting anything the browser sends. Then write the admin half of the access rules in the database so an admin may read, add, change and delete every row in every table, drafts included, and the database enforces the same thing the routes do. Add an admin layout that redirects anyone without the admin role to sign-in, and tell me how to promote my own account.

   v0 routes run on the server, so the check belongs there. A publish rule enforced only in the component is a rule anyone can skip.

4. 04

   Start a new chat for the admin and the image storage

   The back office is the largest screen set in the build and deserves its own chat, so restoring a version later undoes admin work without taking the directory with it.

   PromptBuild the admin and the image storageCopy

   In a new chat, build the admin behind the admin layout: a dashboard with counts of startups, articles and accounts, a startups screen with add and edit dialogs, add a funding round, publish or unpublish, archive, and delete a company together with its rounds, links and tags, then screens for articles, categories, tags, and users where a role is switched between admin and viewer. Create four storage buckets (logos up to 5 MB, covers, gallery and article images up to 10 MB, image types only), readable by anyone and writable only by admins. Add a server route for logo uploads that checks the caller is a signed-in admin, checks the startup exists and the file is under 5 MB, then stores the image and writes its address to the startup. Other images upload from the admin under the bucket rules.

   Be explicit that the upload route checks the role on the server. v0 will otherwise reasonably let the admin screen upload straight from the browser, since the screen already exists.

5. 05

   Wire the news section, then tidy the screens with Design mode

   The news list and article page you sketched in step 01 get real rows, and you spend the time you save on a proper visual pass over the cards.

   PromptWire the news sectionCopy

   Make the news list and the article page read real articles through the routes: the list shows published articles with the featured image, title, category and date, and the article page at /news/its-slug shows the featured image and the body with its line breaks kept. Write a draft article in the admin, confirm it is invisible on the news page, publish it, and confirm it appears.

   For visual fixes on the cards and the filter sidebar, select the element in the preview and use Design mode rather than describing where it sits. It is faster and it changes the real code.

6. 06
   Destination

   Add the landing page and the meta, test as a stranger, then open a pull request

   The marketing page and the share cards come last, then walk the whole thing through signed out and merge, which, if that branch is the linked Vercel project’s production branch, also deploys it.

   PromptAdd the landing page, demo mode, and shipCopy

   Add a marketing landing page with a hero, a sector section, a funding section, a trends section and a closing call to action, written as copy I can edit rather than pulled from the database. Give every public page a title and description and the card that shows when the link is shared. Add a demo mode switch on the sign-in screen that opens the admin with every write intercepted in the browser and a banner saying changes are not saved. Then help me walk the whole site signed out: confirm the unpublished company is nowhere, confirm an article address opens directly, confirm the admin redirects to sign-in. Once it holds up, publish and open a pull request for it.

Review the access rules (row-level security policies) on every table. For each one, tell me in simple terms who can view, add, edit, and delete records, confirm that people can only reach their own data while the right roles can reach more, and flag anything left open that shouldn’t be.

One rule outranks everything above it: your database service key belongs on the server only, never in the app a visitor downloads and never in a repository. The publishable key is meant to be public and the access rules are what protect the data behind it, so if the service key escapes, treat it as compromised and replace it the same day.

Two things decide this, and speed is not one of them. Does the plan allow commercial use, since a directory that runs ads, sells listings or belongs to a fund is a business and Vercel’s Hobby tier is not for one. And does a link to a single article open that article for someone arriving cold, because every host here needs one routing rule for that and the template ships the Vercel version. The host serves one small static folder. Every listing comes from your database.

Add a server-side function called ai that calls my AI provider with the key held in function secrets, never in the browser. It accepts a task name and the text or fields for that task, refuses any caller who is not a signed-in admin, records every call in an ai_calls table (who, which task, tokens in and out, a cost estimate, success or failure), and returns the model’s answer as structured fields the admin screens can fill in. Add a small usage panel to the admin dashboard showing calls and estimated spend this month.

In the add-startup dialog, add a “Draft from website” button that sends the company’s homepage text to the ai function and gets back a one-line and a paragraph description, a suggested category from my categories table, up to five tags, the city and country, and any social links it found. Fill the form with the results for the admin to edit, and never publish anything automatically.

Add a “From announcement” action on the news screen that sends pasted text to the ai function and gets back a draft article (title, slug, body) and, if the text describes a raise, a funding round (stage from my stage list, amount, date, lead investor, co-investors). Show both as prefilled forms for the admin to confirm, match the article to a startup by name with a confirmation step, and leave both unpublished until the admin publishes them.

When an admin saves a startup or an article without tags, call the ai function with the description and get back a suggested category from my table and up to five tags, preferring tags that already exist. Show them as chips the admin accepts or removes before saving, and add a “Suggest tags” button on existing records so the back catalogue can be tidied a page at a time.

Add a “Weekly digest” button on the admin dashboard that gathers the startups, rounds and articles published in the last seven days and asks the ai function for a short digest with a headline, one paragraph, and a bullet per raise with the amount and stage. Save it as an unpublished article and offer a copy-as-text button, since this site does not send email.

v0 doesn’t ship its own model for these prompts, so you bring an API key for whichever provider you want, and v0 writes the route that calls it. Start with a cheap model while you’re still iterating on the prompt itself, then swap in a stronger one for the version that ships, and keep every AI feature behind that one route so there’s only one key to rotate.