What changed
The ~$50B national opioid settlements are now paying out to thousands of state and local subrecipients, and investigative reporting (WTHR/13 Investigates, FACT) shows many communities are spending slowly or improperly. States are responding by standing up tracking/transparency infrastructure — Maryland and Kentucky have both launched public opioid-settlement dashboards (FACT), signaling that documented, categorized, reportable spending is becoming the expected norm and that ad-hoc spending will draw scrutiny.
Why now
Money is already in local hands and the reporting/transparency regime is crystallizing right now (MD and KY dashboards live; investigative scrutiny active). The window is the gap between 'funds received' and 'states/AGs enforcing approved-use categorization' — localities need to categorize and justify spend before clawback or audit pressure lands, but most have no tool and no expertise. Being early means capturing jurisdictions before a state mandates a specific portal/format.
Converging signals
Three signals meet at one point: (1) a funded flow (settlement awards to local governments), (2) a defined actor class forced to justify spend against a fixed list of approved abatement uses (Exhibit E / state-specific approved uses), and (3) an emerging reporting surface (state dashboards/portals). That is the founder's public-money/forced-filer shape.
Customer pain
FACT (WTHR investigation): communities 'struggle to spend opioid settlement funds properly' — funds sit unspent or go to arguably non-approved uses. INFERENCE: a small county treasurer or health officer has money, a list of approved uses they don't fully understand, no software to map planned line-items to approved categories, and fear of being the next 'misspent settlement money' headline or facing clawback.
Who pays
Local governments holding settlement funds (counties, cities, towns) and the boards/committees that administer them; secondarily the consultants and public-health nonprofits who advise them. INFERENCE: thousands of local subrecipients nationally.
Solved today
Spreadsheets, manual reading of the settlement's approved-use exhibits, ad-hoc memos, and — for those who can afford it — public-health/grants consultants billing hourly or a percentage to build spend plans and reports. Some states provide a transparency dashboard but that tracks/publishes spend after the fact; it does not help a locality plan or generate its own compliant report.
Why current solutions are bad
Spreadsheets don't encode the state-specific approved-use taxonomy or flag out-of-category spend before it happens; consultants are expensive and don't scale to small jurisdictions; state dashboards are downstream transparency tools, not upstream planning/compliance tools for the filer. None turn 'here's what we plan to spend' into a categorized, defensible, audit-ready report in minutes.
Proposed product
A micro-SaaS where a jurisdiction enters its settlement receipts and planned/actual expenditures; the tool maps each item to the applicable state's approved abatement category (with a warning when an item is out-of-category or weakly justified), tracks remaining balance by category, and generates the state's required spend plan and periodic compliance/expenditure report in the expected format. Per-jurisdiction subscription.
MVP version
Pick ONE state with an active reporting expectation (start where a dashboard/format already exists, e.g. KY or MD, or the founder's home state). Encode that state's approved-use categories. Build: receipt/expenditure entry, category-mapping with out-of-category flags, running balance-by-category, and a one-click PDF/CSV report matching that state's format. Seed the approved-use taxonomy from the settlement Exhibit E + state guidance.
30-day build
Encode one state's approved-use taxonomy and reporting format. Build entry + mapping + report export. Pull the public list of that state's fund-receiving jurisdictions and their allocations (often published) to build a named prospect list. Ship a landing page with a free 'is your planned spend in an approved category?' checker as the lead magnet.
60-day build
Direct outreach to 30-50 named jurisdictions' treasurers/health officers and the regional councils-of-government that serve clusters of small towns. Offer a live demo mapping their actual (public) allocation. Land 2-3 paid pilots. Add a second state's taxonomy to prove replication.
90-day revenue plan
Convert pilots to annual subscriptions; use each signed jurisdiction as a reference for its neighbors (local-gov peers copy each other). Target first recurring revenue from 3-8 jurisdictions and a signed regional/COG or consultant reseller who covers many small towns at once.
Distribution path
Sell through demonstrated value: a free public-allocation-aware checker; direct outreach to named jurisdictions (allocations are public records — founder's edge); regional councils of government and public-health coalitions as multi-jurisdiction channels; and grants/public-health consultants as resellers who'd rather subscribe than build. Present at state association-of-counties / municipal-league events.
Pricing hypothesis
Per-jurisdiction annual subscription, tiered by fund size: ~$1,500-$6,000/yr for small-to-mid jurisdictions; consultant/COG multi-seat plans higher. Anchor against a consultant's hourly/percentage fee.
Technical difficulty
Low-to-moderate. The hard part is knowledge encoding (state-specific approved-use taxonomies and report formats), not engineering. Core app is CRUD + rules-based categorization + templated report generation; AI assists with categorizing free-text line items and drafting justifications.
Legal / regulatory risk
Moderate-low. Founder is providing a documentation/reporting tool, not legal or financial advice — must include clear disclaimers that the jurisdiction is responsible for compliance determinations. No licensure required to build the tool (compliance is the moat, not a barrier for the founder).
Platform dependency
None meaningful. Submissions/reporting go to government systems or are produced as documents; there is no platform owner who can deplatform the tool.
Founder fit
Very high. This is the founder's proven shape: public money flows to a forced actor class that must document/categorize/report, and a solo operator builds the software layer and charges per jurisdiction. Directly parallels his FMCSA ELDT portal-submission product. Public-records fluency helps build the prospect list; systems thinking fits the taxonomy-encoding work.
Breakout potential
High expansion: 50-state replicable, each state a near-identical build once the first works, plus adjacency into other restricted-fund categories (ARPA/SLFRF, other settlement funds, grant subrecipient reporting) using the same categorize-and-report engine.
Final recommendation
PURSUE, single-state wedge first. It squarely fits the founder's public-money/forced-filer thesis with real, cited demand and 50-state expansion, but the buyer (local government) means slower cycles and no hard deadline — so validate willingness-to-pay with 2-3 paid pilots before over-investing, and lead with the state where a reporting format already exists.
Next action
Pick one state (prefer one with a live dashboard/format like KY or MD, or the founder's home state), pull its public list of fund-receiving jurisdictions and allocations, encode that state's approved-use categories, and build the free 'approved-category checker' lead magnet to open outreach.