ReversePP

Over the last few months, we've been working hard on our Planning Application Aggregator, adding new features like corporate subscriptions, as I mentioned in my previous posts. Today, I'm excited to share some updates on how we've supercharged our search engine, boosting both speed and quality to improve user experience significantly. As our user base grew, both on the individual and corporate fronts, it became increasingly evident that our search feature was turning into a bottleneck. Users were facing slow search speeds and, occasionally, less-than-accurate results. Given that search is a core functionality of our aggregator, it was crucial to tackle this issue head-on.

This was in essence a lot of testing real life queries with several experimental db queries. The disjointed, and sometimes downright bizarre, nature of Planning Application data meant that the queries needed to be quite general but also account for countless edge cases.

After rigorous testing, we rolled out the new search engine to all our users. We monitored the performance closely for the first few weeks, prepared to rollback if things went south. Fortunately, that hasn't been necessary so far.

It wasn't long after rolling out our premium individual subscriptions that I noticed a trend. Individual enthusiasts weren't the only ones benefiting from the tool; entire companies were engaging with our platform. However, the lack of an enterprise-grade, multiple-access solution was a stumbling block.

I realised that by not offering a corporate plan, we were missing out on a substantial revenue stream and also failing to meet the needs of a key user segment—teams within organisations.

After launching the corporate subscription model, a handful of organisations signed up. This resulted in an increase in MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) taking the revenue above operating costs - whoop!

Anecdotally the corporate customers seem like an easier sell and are probably easier to convert than individual users.

As many of you might know, "free" can be both a blessing and a curse. Offering my aggregator for free initially allowed me to quickly attract users, gather valuable feedback, and make iterative improvements. However, "free" also meant zero revenue, leading to challenges in scaling and maintaining the service to the quality I aspired to.

Integrating Stripe was relatively smooth, thanks in part to their well-documented APIs and the abundance of community support available. The mechanics of the auth/users/payment was basically an adaptation of a Netlify protected content tutorial (I changed the front end slightly also adding in a Fauna database to handle user/stripe ids).

A few more reddit blog pieces and I had my first paying customers!

Like many of you, my startup journey began at my 9-to-5 job, where I understood the value of planning application data in OSINT and intelligence investigations. Realising this niche had its pains and shortcomings, I decided to hack away on a personal project that would aggregate planning applications from local councils.

I smashed together an MVP using a fleet of web-scrapers, a basic HTML front end, Flask middleware and a MongoDB database. Within a few months, I had a working prototype with enough data to be valuable.

Before dedicating more time and resources into the project, I needed validation. So, where did I go? Reddit, the birthplace of many great ideas and, admittedly, many not-so-great ones (see previous unsuccessful indie hacker projects). The response was positive with several peers and industry experts reaching out and sharing the value it could bring to their workflow.