I spend the month of June with my family at the lakeside cabin my great grandpa built nearly 100 years ago. I've been coming up here my entire life. Quite literally, in my almost 43 years, I have never missed a summer at Pinecrest.

We only have a few neighbors on this side of the lake and they've watched me grow up. I sat on the deck with one of them yesterday and he told my kids (who also have never missed a Pinecrest summer) that I used to rummage through his pile of comic books, taking a dozen at a time, and come back the next day to get a dozen more.

I used to love comic books. I kinda forgot about that. But now it makes sense.

This is my odd way to introduce... Project Wolverine!

And the $5M we raised to build it 💪

First, some context

I like where we are: Find out what's getting built and who's doing it. That's the what.

Our value proposition is to make it easy for businesses to identify the right contractors, service pros and builders to buy their products and services. That's the why.

But does it scale?

When you take venture capital, the point is to think big. Find a kernel of business and make it pop. We found a kernel. It's the value proposition I described. It wasn't clear, though, if this opportunity alone would make the business pop.

We thought a lot about this. The more customers we worked with, the more feedback we got, and the more deals we lost, the better we understood the market.

Here's what the market told us: "Shovels, we like you. You're smart and friendly. Your CEO writes a good newsletter. Your data is cleaner and better than anything else in the market. But you don't have permit data where we need it, and you don't update it frequently enough."

Basically that. We heard it a lot.

So six months ago Luka and I started leveraging AI in even more creative ways, and the deeper we dug, the clearer this vision became: Daily permit updates, nationwide.

Today we announced that we've raised $5M led by Base10 to build the infrastructure to get us there.

We call it Project Wolverine.

Project Wolverine: Self-healing scrapers for government data

We don't have the best coverage in the market today. The best coverage money can buy is only 15% of permit jurisdictions; we have less than 10%.

This is the opportunity: companies have been aggregating permit data for 30 years and the leader in the market is STILL only at 15% coverage? You deserve better. We deserve better.

So, we've set off to beat that, and not by a little. By a lot!

If there was ever a time to go for it, it's now. AI changes everything, including the way we collect information online.

If we're going to rebuild our architecture, we should make it collect constantly and push updates all the way through from our Enterprise Data License to our API and web app.

This is the future of Shovels.

Project Storm: Offline data collection

But wait... there's more!

Collecting hyperlocal government data is hard work. That's why nobody else has done it at scale. Think about all the major players in real estate data: ATTOM, CoreLogic (Cotality), Verisk, First American, Black Knight, and on and on.

Outside of building permits, they're only getting county data. Nobody is focusing entirely hyperlocal, so this will be our domain.

Daily permit updates, nationwide, is a big idea. Collecting everything else — business licenses, health inspections, budgets, contracts, meeting minutes — is a very big idea. That's venture scale. That's also what we're going to do.

So now you know where we're headed, and you know we have the funds to make it happen.

One more surprise awaits.

Our latest data release

Wolverine is already alive.

We're not doing daily updates yet, but the foundational technology is up and running! This is our first data release entirely on Wolverine. We're ironing out the wrinkles, but all signs are looking GREAT that we'll be able to move to regular weekly updates sometime next quarter.

Here are the stats for this week's data release.

• 1.2M permit updates
• 300 new jurisdictions (typical month was < 10)
• 250K permits in May (typical month was 150K)

We'll have a bunch more jurisdictions coming online next week. We'll do another release then, because we can :)

It's only getting better from here.

Things to do with permits: build a big business

Times are still a bit crazy. Silicon Valley ex-pats forced budget cuts and layoffs throughout the federal government while former New Yorkers stoked a trade war.

What does this mean for business? Government is getting smaller, less centralized. Funds once distributed by the feds will get handled by the states. Without bureaucracy to manage this, states will delegate further down to the cities and counties.

With a smaller federal government and more domestic production, local governments become more important.

This is the big idea behind of Shovels.

Local government data, all of it!