Why I Built CountyPulse
A few years ago, I tried to help a friend decide where to open a coffee shop in Georgia. We spent weeks Googling census data, downloading spreadsheets from BLS, and trying to make sense of county-level crime stats from the FBI.
The data existed. It was all public. But it was scattered across 26 different government websites, updated on different schedules, in different formats. By the time we had a rough comparison of three counties, we'd burned 40+ hours — and we still weren't sure we were looking at the right numbers.
That's when I realized: the hardest part of opening a business isn't the idea — it's knowing where the idea will actually work.
CountyPulse exists to answer that question in minutes, not months.
"Location decisions should be driven by data, not anecdotes. Every business owner deserves the same market intelligence that franchise chains and real estate investors take for granted."
By the Numbers
Our Data Sources
Every data point comes from official federal and state government sources. No surveys, no estimates, no scraped data — just validated public records, updated on a regular schedule.
What We Cover
How It Works
Our pipeline pulls data from 26 government APIs and bulk files, validates every record, and stores it in a local database. We then compute derived metrics — market saturation scores, opportunity rankings, risk profiles, and composite county grades — that don't exist in any single government dataset.
The result is a county-level business intelligence report that would take a consultant weeks to assemble, available instantly for every county we cover.