Creative Data.

Look close enough and you'll find all kinds of good stories.

Welcome back.

I've become obsessed with making tools. Not the kind you buy off a shelf. The kind you build for one person, for one problem, that does in seconds what they've done by hand for years.

Here are two of them this week. One I built for someone else. One I built for me.

INTELLIGENCE OF THE WEEK

The deal hiding in the data.

A friend of mine has invested in real estate for years. He works the Bronx. He knows the blocks, the buildings, the corners that are starting to turn.

He finds distressed properties the hard way, driving around, pulling records one at a time. He told me the part that eats his time is the hunting. The deals are sitting right there in the public record. You just have to find them before anyone else does.

So we built a tool. He points it at the Bronx, and it pulls nine public data sources at once. Tax liens, foreclosure filings, building violations, complaints, permits, probate transfers, and the assessor records that tell it who owns the place and what it's worth. Then it stacks them.

A tax lien by itself is a record. A tax lien plus a long vacancy plus an absent owner is a story. A house nobody's lived in since November. Weeks from the city's tax sale.

It finds it in seconds. He used to find it in a week.

This week we started co-marketing it together. Three hundred a month.

Here's the part I keep thinking about. I got here through 20+ years in film and television production. Finding the story was always the job. The character, the tension, the thing underneath.

And it's the same job here. The data is just new material. Anyone can pull the records now. Access is free. The work is seeing which two things connect into a story.

That part doesn't automate. That's the part I love.

CREATIVE OF THE WEEK

The shot hiding in the idea.

Not every tool I make is for a client. Some I build just for me, for my own production.

This week I made a short LinkedIn marketing video, mostly just to exercise my feelings about solopreneurship. I've wanted a concept-to-storyboard tool for a while now. I finally built it. It's called Brief, and it's super useful if you want to tell a visual story.

I didn't storyboard this one by hand. I gave Brief the concept, and it handed me back the shots. Piece by piece, my entire production pipeline is becoming software.

Brief · storyboard · building the plane

F.001

F.002

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▶ Watch the video

Same eye as the real estate tool. One finds the deal in the data. One finds the shot in the idea. The tool changes every time. The eye behind it never does. That's the part nobody can copy.

Until next week.

Erich

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