Shovels June 2023 Newsletter
Hello!
Enough with the fundraising blah blah blah. It's time to start talking about building permits! Here's the quick newsletter summary:
- We are cranking through 100 million building permits and doing all the things: cleaning, normalizing, fixing, and scrubbing so you can get great data.
- Order of release will be California, Florida, Texas, and New York. I'll announce the next tranche in a month.
- There are some really interesting go-to-market (GTM) uses for building permits. I'll name a few.
- Early-bird pricing will be available in the next newsletter.
Processing update
We are burning up the servers at AWS! Amazon has granted multiple requests to increase our Fargate limits. That's how cool we are.
Processing all of this data is not without its challenges. While I hoped we'd have all of California launched already, we're doggone close, and I know you're going to love what we deliver. Here are a few of the things you can look forward to:
- Permits in over 200 jurisdictions. The Golden State LOVES local permitting.
- Building electrification tagging. We've identified all the permits related to batteries, heat pumps, EV chargers, and solar panels. We 💚 the 🌎 too.
- Contractor rollups. All these permits and tags roll up to contractors so you can see who's doing how much of what type of work.
- Normalized addresses. The lovely people who enter permits into databases do all sorts of funny things with addresses, making us 🥺. So we fixed them for you.
Man, we are so close to launch. Soo close! We'll send a quick newsletter out when it's done.
Things to do with permits: GTM
When people come through our marketing funnel, I always ask them what they plan to do with Shovels data. The uses are varied, but there's been an increasingly common use case: go-to-market (GTM).
This makes sense! Building permits are a gold mine for both B2B and B2C buyer intent. For B2B, a submitted commercial building permit means that the builder is in purchasing mode. Construction tech companies should get on it! Building entry systems, HVAC components, project management software... the roof's the limit.
For B2C, a recently completed residential permit is a prime target for property tech companies. That homeowner is now ready to fix the lawn that just got torn up, install a new driveway, or put up solar panels. We can filter for EV chargers and batteries so climate tech companies can reach out about cost-cutting software add-ons.
I wrote more detail about all of this in our latest blog post: Go-to-market strategies for proptech companies.
Pricing update
We're still figuring it out, but I'm certain that we will offer a low-volume plan and special unlimited volume pricing for CA, FL, TX and NY once it's loaded. In the future, we'll offer pricing tiers for historical data and enhanced permit details. For our earliest customers, though, we'll throw it all in.
We'll let you know when you can get in on this Shovels API pricing bonanza.