Passport Appointment Alert Service

For an appointment-alert product, the first customers are usually people already feeling the queue problem intensely. Rainey noticed a UK passport-renewal bottleneck and built around the narrow task of finding open appointments.

The first dollar in this model comes when a user values timely access enough to pay for monitoring or an alert. Rainey says the service reached strong demand and more than $1,000 a day at peak, with Google Ads helping capitalize on the urgency.

Growth becomes self-reinforcing when successful alerts create proof, referrals, and more useful coverage data. In this case, the underlying trigger was a widely shared shortage: people needed appointments, and a fast alert could be immediately valuable.

A seasonal alert service can lose momentum when the backlog clears or government appointment supply changes. Rainey explicitly describes the passport product as seasonal, so a founder should plan for the demand curve rather than treat peak days as a permanent run rate.