I built DeadlineSentry in a weekend for $12 - a free tool that tells you tour LLC's filing deadline and what missing it costs
Florida charges LLC owners a $400 late fee the day after the May 1 annual report deadline. No waivers, no exceptions. Most people who get hit never saw a reminder — the state emails whatever address their formation service left on file years ago.
Every state has its own version of this trap. Delaware's $300 LLC tax has no form at all, so nothing ever arrives to remind you. California runs two separate obligations on two different schedules. Texas requires a report even when you owe $0. Arizona, hilariously, requires nothing — but almost nobody knows that either.
So I built a free checker: pick your state + entity type + formation date, get your exact deadlines, fees, and penalties in 10 seconds — including a warning if you may have already missed one.
https://deadlinesentry.com
Covers 10 states so far (FL, DE, CA, TX, NY, IL, GA, NC, AZ, CO), adding more weekly.
Some honest launch-week notes, since that's what this community is for: total spend so far is $12 (the domain). I posted to r/SideProject on launch day — 113 views, zero conversions. Lesson learned fast: builders browsing side projects aren't LLC owners with a deadline problem. The channel that IS working: the site got indexed and started ranking on Google within 48 hours for "florida llc annual report" searches, which is exactly where someone with this problem actually is at 11pm.
The plan: free checker + SEO guides as the funnel, then a paid tier ($12/mo) that watches every deadline for you and reminds you at 90/60/30/7 days. Validating the waitlist before building it.
Would love feedback — especially from anyone who's eaten one of these late fees, and whether the early-access pitch is strong enough to leave an email for.
nice one. the weekend build is the easy 20% though — the real product is keeping 50 states' rules current forever. the day florida bumps that $400 or shifts the date and the checker still shows the old number, it flips from helpful to actively harmful: someone trusts a wrong deadline and eats the fee anyway. that maintenance job is both your moat and the trap.
What stood out to me wasn't the filing checker—it was the distribution lesson.
Realizing that people discover this problem through search rather than founder communities changes the whole acquisition strategy. It feels like the product became much stronger once you optimized around when people recognize the problem, not just what the solution is.
Thanks — that's exactly the shift. The thing that made it click for me: the moment of pain has a timestamp. Nobody wakes up wanting deadline software; they want it the day they get a $400 notice, or the night before they think something's due. Search is the only channel that's present at that exact moment. Communities like this one are where I learn how to build the thing — but the customer is mid-Google, not mid-scroll.
The nice side effect is it disciplined the roadmap too: every feature now has to answer "does this help the person who just searched their problem?" Cuts a lot of nice-to-haves.
Interesting.
Reading your reply made me think less about search as an acquisition channel and more about what the product quietly commits itself to once it's designed around the exact moment someone recognizes the problem.
I don't think I can explain that line of reasoning properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?