A timely alert service monetized a temporary shortage of passport-renewal appointments.
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Alex Rainey built a passport-appointment alert service during paternity leave, when UK families faced a rush to renew passports after pandemic-era appointments became scarce. Using basic web scraping, he monitored government appointment sites and alerted users when slots became available and where they were located.
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Data credibility: Alex Rainey reported the product’s peak daily revenue and described the launch and acquisition timeline. Figures are founder-reported and unaudited; ad spend and profit are not provided.
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.
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