Opportunity Scout

Overview

Opportunity Scout is a research and validation platform that finds software opportunities in small and mid-sized business industries that current software serves poorly, or not at all. It doesn’t stop at naming an industry. For each opportunity it describes the specific product that would help, who would buy it, and what that buyer uses today, whether that is a full management platform or a data or processing API a business would subscribe to.

The system runs continuously. AI research agents survey industries, gather evidence from public sources, assess existing competitors, and score each opportunity against a structured rubric. A separate verification agent then reviews those findings adversarially, checking claims against their original sources before anything reaches a human decision. Opportunities that hold up move into prospecting, where the platform identifies real businesses in the target market, finds their contact information, and drafts written outreach so the idea can be validated with actual customers before any build begins.

Results are managed through a secure web dashboard with a defined workflow that takes each opportunity from discovery through deep-dive research, prospect validation, and a final build decision.

Opportunity Scout began as InstantImpact’s internal tool and is being developed into a product for other software studios, with each studio’s settings, scoring, and data kept separate.

My Role

Founder, product owner, and architect. I conceived the system, wrote the full specification, designed the data model, opportunity workflow, and dashboard, and directed implementation milestone by milestone. I also set up and manage the production infrastructure, sending services, and access controls.

Technical Stack

• Research pipeline: Python 3.12, with AI agents built on the Anthropic Claude API for research, scoring, verification, and outreach drafting
• Dashboard: Laravel, with role-based user access and an audit trail
• Database: PostgreSQL, shared by the pipeline and the dashboard
• Data sources: public web research plus U.S. Census and NAICS industry data
• Hosting: AWS Lightsail (Ubuntu), behind Cloudflare with Cloudflare Access protecting the dashboard
• Email: Elastic Email for notifications and outreach, Rackspace for mailboxes
• Development: WSL (Ubuntu), Git and GitHub, spec-first milestone workflow