150M permits at your disposal

September 2024 Newsletter

Company
Ryan Buckley

Ryan Buckley

CEO

We got to meet SO MANY of you at RE+ and Blueprint this year!

It was wonderful to shake hands and say hi in Anaheim and Las Vegas. If you missed us this year, you'll have another chance to meet us in September 2025. We're definitely going back.

And, as promised to those we met at Blueprint, send an email to sales@shovels.ai to get two months free on a new annual plan.


I write this on a short reprieve from travel. This week is Climate Week in NYC and the meeting calendar is packed. Then I return and do a final product and marketing push before the launch of our new API and web app!

The long-awaited V2 is finally happening. That and more are described below.

  • You're building cool stuff with our API. We can see the pings but we don't really know what you're doing. Please share your projects with us and we'll tell the whole world about it.
  • Speaking of API projects, we're also thinking about organizing a hackathon. If YOU have an API you want participants to consider using alongside Shovels, please reply.
  • V2 is launching next month. It's all-out sprint time over here. Nobody is sleeping. It's chaos. (Just kidding, we're way too on top of things for that 😌)
  • A sales and marketing wizard named Jordan Crawford led a phenomenal livestream using Shovels API and Clay. View all FIVE FREAKING HOURS of it here. If you're a sales nerd, this is your jam.
  • You can now run ads based on building permit history! One of our partners has connected the dots between The Trade Desk (TTD), LiveRamp, and other partners with Shovels building permit data and it is LIVE. (This might become a very very big deal.)
  • Washington, D.C. is live, too! 🎩
  • And we hired two amazing people: Alex Brown is our support and writing guru and Whitney House will help us with sales!

Quick reminder

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 2,300 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.

Our three-layer cake: contractor, homeowner, and market intelligence

There's something about answering the question, "So what does Shovels do?" about a million and a half times over four weeks that forces some introspection.

Like, yea man... What do we do?

Like any startup, the nuances of this answer waft about like leaves in the fall (just ask my bay trees). Investors push us one way; customers pull us another. I've been watching the leaves fall and this is where they've landed:


Shovels transforms building permit data into actionable insights about contractors, homeowners, and market trends.


I'll briefly describe each and share what it means for the coming months.

Contractor intelligence

This is how most of you found Shovels. You recognized that ZoomInfo and LinkedIn have little useful data about building contractors. Google Maps, Yelp, and state license files can't tell you who's active or where they actually take jobs.

I've written about this many times, so I won't do it again. Shovels is going to be the best (or maybe we're already the best?) at compiling and distributing firmographic data about building contractors.

This hard work goes on and on and on. (And on and on.)

Homeowner intelligence

Fewer of you come to us for homeowner intel but I think this will change soon.

We're SUPER EXCITED about our partnership with a DIGITAL ADVERTISING PARTNER who has ticked and tied our building permit data into The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, and a handful of other DSPs.

Now you can target digital audiences based on deterministic homeowner purchase intent data... FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER.

Want to target folks remodeling their kitchen? ✅

New homeowners who want to install solar? ✅

People who need new appliances? ✅

The possibilities are endless. You can also still use us to get lists for SMS, phone, email, and direct mail campaigns, of course.

Market intelligence

Eventually, Shovels will predict the future. We'll say what's going to happen based on building permit trends and other signals. We need to open up some engineering cycles to do this, but it's on the horizon.

For now, we can roll up permits into census tracts and neighborhoods and do things like the Neighborhood Vitality Index (NVI) which I've written about previously. This concept played really well at Blueprint and I'm looking forward to getting our first NVI customer in the coming weeks.

From the Engineering desk: V2 is coming!

It's all V2, all the time now. And we are very excited to release this new and improved experience to all of our customers. We've been thinking about this for a year prepping for it for a couple of quarters, and implementing it for the last two months.

Now we're getting ready to release!

In the meantime, the other projects keep running too.

🚀 New Features

  • Even more contractor de-duplication so you see the full history on your contractor lookups.
  • Washington, DC is now live 🎩!

🔮 Coming Soon

  • New UI designs based on wireframes for our Shovels Online app (see below)
  • API V2 scaffolding in the works
  • Transformation and ingestion of 35 additional data sources for more comprehensive contractor information

Shovels Online V2 login screen

We're excited to show this to the world next month!

Things to do with permits: run online ads

Have you ever run a Google or Facebook ad campaign? You can run ads for just about any audience segment: puppy lovers, hair extension users, and Raiders fans.

One segment you can't run is home remodelers, general contractors, or solar panel owners (only maybe that they visited a solar company website).

Until now.

I'm not an ad tech guy. I still don't know the difference between a DSP and an SSP. Fortunately, we have an expert here with us and she happens to run basically all of our commercial business.

Betty Wan knows ad tech and when I first started playing with this idea on LinkedIn, she reached out. An investor we both know ended up making a bunch of intros to companies that are in the bowels of the ad tech machinery and after many months of meetings, we have finally crossed the chasm.

As shared above, our Shovels audience segments are LIVE. Meaning, like, you can run ads TODAY against Shovels data. To start, we have three audiences:

  • Consumers who are homeowners of single-family houses in the United States and who have an older HVAC system (defined as >8 years old based on industry benchmarks).
  • Consumers who are homeowners of single-family houses in the United States and who have a newer HVAC system (defined as <5 years old based on industry benchmarks).
  • Consumers who are homeowners of single-family houses in the United States and who have older appliances (>8 years old based on industry benchmarks).

What's so cool about this is we can slice this up in a million different ways. We only chose these three because we have a big (BIG!) box store interested in testing this out.

Could you be the next customer? Let us know!