Two people showed up with problems that sounded nothing alike, so I ran both builds at once on a split screen for an hour. One of them shipped a week later as a list of 142,579 franchise operators.
On the right, a subscriber trying to find every multi-unit franchise operator in the country — the people who own forty Taco Bells, not Taco Bell. He'd already pulled a list of roughly five hundred multi-unit operators for that one brand and found websites for about sixty of them. The other four hundred were shell companies. John LLC owned by Great Lakes LLC owned by something else.
On the left, Marius. He sells a tool that reads ad creative and flags legal exposure, and he wanted campaigns for consumer brands — alcohol first, beauty second.
Different industries, different buyers, different data. I asked both of them the same question inside the first two minutes.
Start from the document a regulator forced someone to publish
That's the first place I look now, before I look at a scraper or a vendor or a search API.
Somebody in this market was compelled by law to publish the thing you want. A regulator wrote a rule, a company complied, and the compliance artifact is now sitting in public. It's structured, it's dated, it names names, and it exists because a lawyer said it had to — which means it's more complete than anything a marketing team would have chosen to put on a website.
The franchise world has this in the most literal form I've found. Under the federal franchise rule, every franchisor has to hand prospective buyers a disclosure document, and Item 20 of that document requires them to list their franchisees. Not summarize. List. The current ones by name with the address and phone number of each outlet, and every franchisee who got terminated, cancelled, or walked away in the last fiscal year by name, city, state, and business phone.
Read that as a seller and you have a national roster of small-business owners, updated annually, with phone numbers, published because the government made someone publish it.
Marius's version is the same shape wearing a different coat. Regulators fine consumer brands for ad claims, those enforcement actions are public with dollar amounts attached, and the ads themselves sit in the platforms' public ad libraries. One side gives you the price of getting it wrong. The other gives you everyone currently doing it.
The reason I reach for this before I reach for a scraper is that a compelled disclosure has a completeness guarantee behind it. A scrape has coverage you have to go measure. A filing has coverage somebody can be sued over.
Who Gets This
Both builds below are the actual sessions — what each person walked in with, what I typed, what came back, and the messages that fell out the other side.
Free: the question I open with, and why a compelled filing beats a scrape.
$50/mo (most readers start here): everything below the line in this post, and every paid article.
$2,499/yr: Every tool I ship. Edge Copilot is how you talk to all of it through Claude Code. Current tools: Edge Copilot, AutoClaygent, Agent 7, Who to Target and What to Say, Blueprint Cloud, Technology Finder, Video List Extractor, Competitor Monitor, LinkedIn Engagement, Domain & LinkedIn Finder, Dossier Builder, PDF Contact Finder, TAM Contact Harvester, Find a Rep, Blueprint Playbook, Crawford, JoJo. Whatever ships next is included. Plus all 3 courses + weekly Applied Office Hours. (Go annual — $2,499/yr.)
Below the line in this post:
The franchise build, from the compelled filing to 142,579 named operators
The check I ran before trusting a single row of it
The message that opens with a competitor's fine, and who it goes to
Every question from the room, with the answer
Every week I run Applied Office Hours on Zoom — bring what you're building and we'll work it live.
