What it is
A Chrome extension for residential-construction project managers tracking permit statuses across 300+ US municipalities that run on Accela. One “Check All” instead of ninety minutes of portal-clicking. The parsing is corpus-driven (HTML snapshots from real portals, selectors scored by confidence across cities), which I still think is the right way to handle 300 near-identical-but-not-quite DOMs.
Why I built it
My idea-hunting machine surfaced it: real pain, sharp ICP, validated on Reddit and X. It recommended a Chrome extension because I’d already shipped one. First commit to paid listing on the Chrome Web Store: about four days, outreach scripts included.
What happened
People installed it. Nobody paid. And the reason is the lesson: construction PMs aren’t technical. Many don’t really know what a browser extension is, let alone why they’d trust one with their permit URLs. The pain was real; the delivery mechanism was wrong for the people who have the pain.
What I learned
Validating the pain is half the job. The other half is validating that your ICP can operate the thing you’re going to ship them. Technical feasibility for the user, not the builder. It’s still online (the parser was too good to delete), but I file this one under tuition.