Your City Posts This Online Every Day. Use AI to Sell It.

Business concept

Turn publicly available building-permit records into a daily, filtered lead alert for local contractors. Contractors select a trade and ZIP code, then receive relevant new permits by email at 7 a.m. and can browse them in a dashboard.

The service’s value is speed and convenience: permits can indicate that a homeowner or builder is about to spend significantly, and contractors may benefit from reaching out before competitors do. The product repackages public—but difficult-to-use—data into actionable sales leads.

The presenter identifies five target trades: fencing, landscaping, pools, gutters, and blinds/shutters. He uses fence companies as the example for outreach.

Playbooks and operating approach

• Validate demand before building. Sell a tailored version to a large local contractor first—for example, for a setup fee plus a monthly charge—instead of building a generic product before finding a buyer.
• Start narrow, then replicate. Build for one city and one trade or use case, then adapt the app for other trades, ZIP codes, and cities.
• Reduce customer friction. Keep sign-up simple, deliver leads by email, filter by trade and ZIP code, explain why a permit is relevant, and link to the official city record.
• Automate the workflow. Use an AI app builder to connect the permit feed, create the website and dashboard, set up payments, and schedule email delivery. The agent’s plan mode divides work into concurrent tasks.
• Check data quality and fulfillment. Distinguish historical records from fresh permits so customers aren’t charged for stale leads. Repeated refunds are a signal of a fulfillment problem that needs fixing.
• Keep the offer low-risk. The outreach promises a full refund if the customer doesn’t land a lead within 30 days.
• Treat roadblocks as part of execution. When the Dallas data source required contacting the city, the presenter switched to Chicago, where he found a usable public feed. He also emphasizes testing the app and finishing the “last mile” of setup before promoting it.

Pricing, costs, and results

• Proposed subscription price: $99 per month. The example math is 20 contractors × $99 ≈ $2,000 per month.
• App usage cost shown: $5.67, plus $11 for the domain name, or about $17 total. The presenter says the project could be built on a $20-per-month plan.
• The presenter says the work took under an hour. The unedited video was about 53 minutes, though he also spent time on dinner and other activities.
• The Chicago app displayed 2,699 recent permits.
• Initial prospect list: 22 fence companies and 22 landscaping companies. Of the 44 businesses:
  • 23 had email contacts.
  • 5 had website contact forms.
  • 12 had only Instagram or Facebook DMs.
• Research for the other target trades was still underway.
• The presenter tested the subscription flow himself but explicitly did not count himself as a paying customer. The subtitles do not report an external sale or customer conversion.

Sales and expansion ideas

An outreach message can identify a specific recent permit, mention the prospect’s ZIP code or service area, explain the likely opportunity, and offer the next day’s list free with no card required. Continued access costs $99 per month.

As a higher-value alternative, the presenter suggests building a customized version for one contractor, with that company’s trade, ZIP code, and branding, for $1,500 setup plus $200 per month.

The expansion path is to reuse the same software across multiple noncompeting trades in one city, then adapt it to other cities with accessible permit data.

The presenter also describes using an additional browser agent to repeatedly approve email sends. He cautions that giving agents broad permissions is a personal risk decision and suggests contact forms as a way to submit outreach in bulk with less manual approval.

Tools and sources

• Presenter: Chris Koerner
• Tools: Replit Agent for building and research; Stripe for payments; Resend for email; Namecheap for the domain; and Grokbot/Muse for browser-agent outreach automation
• Data source: Public city building-permit data, with Chicago used for the final example