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Public Incentive ROI Tracker
Build a SaaS platform that tracks economic development incentives from promise to payout to verified job outcomes. It would give journalists, watchdog groups, policy teams, and investors a clear way to calculate cost per job, compare programs, and flag underperformance before the next funding round.
Why this matters
You are trying to answer a simple question: did this subsidy actually create the jobs it promised? Instead of a clean answer, you end up digging through agency announcements, partial disclosures, construction updates, and economic claims that mix direct payments with tax relief and site work. By the time you assemble the spreadsheet, the political decision is already old news. Existing reports give snapshots, not a living record. You need a system that turns scattered public documents into a credible, comparable scorecard so you can challenge bad deals or defend good ones with evidence, not guesswork.
- · Built for Policy research groups, investigative newsrooms, state oversight offices, legislative staff, and civic organizations that monitor public spending outcomes..
- · Most likely monetization: SaaS subscription.
The Pain · Narrative
You are trying to answer a simple question: did this subsidy actually create the jobs it promised? Instead of a clean answer, you end up digging through agency announcements, partial disclosures, construction updates, and economic claims that mix direct payments with tax relief and site work. By the time you assemble the spreadsheet, the political decision is already old news. Existing reports give snapshots, not a living record. You need a system that turns scattered public documents into a credible, comparable scorecard so you can challenge bad deals or defend good ones with evidence, not guesswork.
Score Breakdown
Market Signal
Go-to-Market
State-level policy analysts and nonprofit watchdog teams that publish fiscal accountability research.
A few thousand organizations and teams in North America to start
cold outbound
$499/month
10 demos booked and 3 paying pilot customers within 30 days using one state dataset
MVP Scope · 1–2 weeks
- Define a normalized schema for incentives, payouts, promised jobs, actual jobs, and reporting dates
- Ingest 20 public projects from one state manually into PostgreSQL
- Build a simple web dashboard with project list, cost-per-job, and status flags
- Add CSV and PDF upload with assisted field extraction
- Draft methodology notes that explain assumptions for each calculation
- Implement alerts for missed milestones and projects with unclear payout categories
- Add side-by-side comparison views across projects and industries
- Create exportable charts and public share links for reports
- Set up Stripe billing and role-based accounts
- Run outbound to watchdog groups, legislative staff, and journalists with a live demo
Differentiation
Why This Might Fail
Self-rebuttal — the most important trust signal
- 1The buyer segment may agree with the problem but lack recurring software budget, especially in journalism and nonprofit teams.
- 2Public data may be too inconsistent to automate enough of the workflow, making the product feel like an expensive research service.
- 3If the platform is perceived as politically slanted rather than methodologically neutral, trust and adoption will suffer.
Evidence Summary
How AI synthesized this insight — no verbatim quotes
Discussion concentrated heavily on failed job-creation claims, unusually high implied cost per job, and confusion over what spending was real cash versus other incentives. Roughly a dozen comments pointed to weak accountability, while several noted that underperformance keeps recurring because there is no reliable consequence or transparent tracking system. That combination supports demand for an outcome-monitoring product.
Action Plan
Validate this opportunity before writing code
Recommended Next Step
Build
Strong demand signals detected. Real pain, real willingness to pay — start building an MVP.
Landing Page Copy Kit
Ready-to-paste copy based on real Reddit community language — no editing required
Headline
Public Incentive ROI Tracker
Sub-headline
Build a SaaS platform that tracks economic development incentives from promise to payout to verified job outcomes. It would give journalists, watchdog groups, policy teams, and investors a clear way to calculate cost per job, compare programs, and flag underperformance before the next funding round.
Who It's For
For Policy research groups, investigative newsrooms, state oversight offices, legislative staff, and civic organizations that monitor public spending outcomes.
Feature List
✓ Incentive database with project-level timelines, payouts, and promised outcomes ✓ Automatic cost-per-job and milestone attainment calculations ✓ Document ingestion from PDFs, press releases, and public records ✓ Alerts for missed job targets, delayed projects, and expiring reporting deadlines ✓ Public-facing dashboard export for transparency portals
Where to Validate
Share your landing page in r/HN · front_page — that's exactly where these pain points were discovered.
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