PermitSync

01The full story: the most business-like idea in Greg's whole MicroSaaS list

PermitSync isn't a product with revenue already running — it's an executable idea Greg Isenberg threw out in MicroSaaS 101 for you to copy. There's a reason he raised it: in the same session he mentioned a tool called Bank Statement Converter, which does nothing but convert bank statement PDFs to Excel — about as boring a chore as exists — and yet gets to $40K/mo. Greg's logic is that the genuinely stable micro SaaS is usually unsexy: it solves a specific hassle that a certain group of people runs into every so often, and that is both annoying and urgent when they do. Before an American homeowner renovates (adding a deck, redoing a kitchen, installing a water heater), the law almost always requires a permit from the city first. The problem is that every city wants something different: which forms, whether a structural engineer's stamp is required, whether a neighbor-consent affidavit is needed, where the inspection sits in the sequence — to anyone who hasn't done it, it's a tangle. The result is that huge numbers of homeowners get stuck at step one, put off starting work, or pay through the nose for someone to file on their behalf. PermitSync productizes this: answer three questions (which city, what project, how much square footage) and it hands you a filled-out application package plus a next-steps checklist. Greg gives no real revenue numbers — that has to be flagged honestly — but he spells out the pain point, the moat, the pricing, and the upgrade path, which puts this in the most actionable tier of his long list of ideas.

The first buyers of a city-specific permit package come out of one city, never from a national launch. The opening move is to pick a single metro, normalise its published permit checklist, and cover the three projects homeowners actually file for — a deck, a kitchen remodel, a water heater swap.