Original Summary

people who do. A few months ago I wanted to build a web scraper that could turn into a real business. I asked ChatGPT for a list of the ten most profitable scraping ideas. Most were crowded, but one stood out: turning public building permits into sales leads for contractors. Big lead platforms cover general construction. Nobody seemed to be doing it well for a niche trade, so I picked fire protection and started building. That scraper grew into a full app called PermitTorch. Cities and counties publish building and fire permits on open data portals. Every day PermitTorch pulls new permits from 32 US markets and cleans them up. It removes duplicates and flags the ones that look like fire protection work, such as sprinkler, alarm and suppression jobs or new commercial builds. Each lead gets a score from 0 to 100. You can click the score to see exactly why it got those points, so it's never a black box. Subscribers can filter leads by market, score and date. They can save the ones they like, export them to CSV and get a daily or weekly email digest. Where the permit itself lists a phone number, email or license number for the people involved, the app shows that too. Plans run from $49 to $249 a month, and every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. You can see it here: https://permittorch.com Here's the honest part. I'm a solo developer in Houston and I know nothing about the fire protection business. I don't know which permits a sprinkler contractor actually cares about. I also don't know how they find work today or what they would pay for a tool like this. Billing works and the data is flowing, but I don't have paying customers yet. So I'm putting it out there. I'd love to hear from: - people who work in fire protection or another trade and can tell me what's useful and what's noise - anyone with sales experience in construction or B2B software who'd want to help sell it - developers or data people who want to collaborate on improving it I'm open to partnerships, revenue sharing or just honest feedback. If you think the whole idea is flawed, I want to hear that too. Comment or DM me.   submitted by   /u/Inchardware [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/10/6 03:16:18