I want to say that January was kind of a lot, that it was pretty intense.
These are phrases I used in high school until a friend told me I can't say that. It's either a lot or it's a little; it's either intense or it's not. It can't be both.
So I'll say this instead: January was a lot. It was intense.
That's why this might be our longest newsletter ever.
You're getting this email because you reached out to us. We send one big newsletter each month. People seem to like it -- we now have over 4,700 subscribers!
Shovels transforms building permit data into actionable insights about contractors, homeowners, and market trends.
We post all of our newsletters on our blog. If you want the full recap on what's been going on at Shovels, you can read them all here.
Partnerships galore
In January we pushed forward with three new partners and I'm excited about each of them. You're probably familiar with of these guys: Regrid, Clay, and Cherre. I'll share a bit more about each one.
Regrid
Regrid is the leader in parcel data. They've been at it the longest, they have the best reputation, and they recently became the official parcel data partner for Esri. They're a big deal.
For the last year, we've been asking these three questions: What happens when we merge Regrid parcel data and Shovels permit data together? Do businesses want to buy it? For how much?
The answers are: It's awesome. Yes. A lot.
As of just a few days ago, we are able to roll Shovels permits into Regrid parcels, unlocking a trove of fascinating site selection, market intelligence, and construction analytics insights. It's really just the beginning of this story and I can't wait to see how it unfolds.
In future newsletters we'll have a lot more to say about why permits and parcels play so nicely together.
Clay
I've written about Clay here before. Clay is a sales hacking Swiss army knife. It lets you do lead research, data cleansing, scraping, and tons of AI. The the 3rd party integrations are really slick.
We've had a bunch of people do Shovels integrations with Clay manually, using our API. Well, no need for that anymore! A native integration is in the works. The Clay engineering team is actively working on it.
Clay has been blowing up recently and I'm excited for what this will do for our own brand awareness.
Cherre
These guys are the leading real estate data marketplace. What they do differently is support the analysis of disparate datasets. So you not only can buy a bunch of different real estate and construction data, but when you get it, it's already tied together with common join keys. This makes it much easier to work across datasets.
We're adding building permit and building contractor data into the mix with Cherre. You'll be able to purchase it in bulk from them. See our page here.
Major updates to Shovels Online and API
There were two-and-a-half big updates last month to our phenomenal web app, Shovels Online.
First, we got rid of our strict 7-day trial! Now you can enjoy a free version of Shovels Online with limited functionality forever. This is the plan for anyone who can't pay $599/mo right now.
Second, we added new address profile pages and fixed some bugs in our city, county, and jurisdiction pages. They're working a lot better!
And a half: we made the date range picker a lot better on contractor and permit searches. Now you can zero in on specific date ranges and the whole thing just makes a lot more sense.
A new forever free plan
We want as many people, businesses, researchers, and data wonks as possible to have access to building permit data. In this time of disappearing data, it feels even more important.
However, we do have a business to run, bills to pay, etc. So we can't just give it all away. We settled on these options.
The free plan: access to every permit, contractor, address, and geo profile, but
- No downloads to CSV
- No viewing address residents
- No viewing contractor employees
- No API
The $599/mo plan: all the free plan access, but
- Up to 1,000 records downloaded at once
- Access to residents and employees
- Month-to-month, cancel anytime
- No API
We hope this is simple enough for our customers who are no-code and want an easy-to-use dashboard. To make it even more simple, you can upgrade to $599/mo directly in Shovels Online.
And of course, we still have our API, so if you need that, you can also purchase it for $599/mo!
New address profiles
These were a long time coming!
On our new address profiles (over 30 million of them!) you can see vital stats about the property, like lot size and building area, all the permits and all the contractors who worked on that address.
We also show derived metrics, like the total value of all the permits pulled on the address. These new profiles are a welcome addition to Shovels Online and complete the set of geographical profiles we set out to build from the beginning.
Here's a screenshot of a random address in Fremont, CA.
A better date picker
We have this saying at Shovels: "the little things are the big things." This is a little thing but it's also a big thing. So yes, old high school friend, it's both.
Date ranges max out at 90 days! And in the next release we'll order permits so the most recent ones will always be first.
A lower free API limit
We used to give 1,000 free API pings, but since we're including so much more data in each response, we had to pull that limit back. We're now offering 250 free API pings. If you're over 250 and want to keep using our API, you'll need to subscribe.
Which brings me to…
Self-serve subscriptions!
Like I said, you can now upgrade Shovels Online and Shovels API directly from your Shovels Online profile! Our web app pricing starts at $599/mo and, possibly by sheer coincidence, our API pricing also starts at $599/mo.
Check them out by logging in at https://app.shovels.ai and navigating to your profile in the top right corner!
And because nothing is worse than jumping through hoops to cancel subscriptions, we give you that ability direcly within Shovels Online. These base plans are month-to-month, cancel any time.
If we can't give you $599 of value every month, that's on us to fix.
A growing team
The engineering team spent a majority of December and January in hiring mode. We're super honored to welcome three amazing engineers to the ranks at Shovels. We're now nine strong and plan to hold steady at this headcount for a bit.
Until about a month ago we only had two engineers, my co-founder Luka and our first hire, Petra. I mention that because we got this nice comment on a LinkedIn post recently.
Spencer, we're just warming up.
Things to do with permits: Add TICKERS
Tickers… that'd be a funny way to refer to people on TikTok. But I digress.
We've been talking to some pretty big financial institutions recently and they've urged us to add stock tickers to our permit and contractor datasets. It's a very interesting idea.
We were able to apply tickers to permit contractors pretty quickly, and we now have building permit history on over 600 publicly-traded businesses. This building permit behavior can be a leading indicator for future growth or a model input to explain past stock performance and earnings reports.
Things also get interesting when we apply tickers to permit addresses. We can do this on commercial addresses, allowing you to, say, grab all the permits for Starbucks or Google or Target locations. The trick is to get all of the addresses for all of the business locations in the United States. We now have this database, and with a bit of processing focus (maybe some customer interest?), we can do the merge.
Then we'll have the building permits pulled by public companies and the building permits completed by public companies.
We can even note when publicly traded companies are mentioned in the permit descriptions. That's every reference to Whirlpool, LG, Breville, Haier and more across 167 million permits. It could be a very valuable dataset.
And the byproduct of tracking all the public companies, of course, is we'll get all the private companies too.
Moving the ball forward, one permit idea at a time.
(Congrats, Eagle fans 🦅)