roadhand.app — the decision-intelligence platform for traveling skilled trades workers. Welders, electricians, pipefitters, ironworkers, and the 500K+ tradespeople who drive a thousand miles for a contract. Live, with a paid-host portal already running.
What it is
The four content types that feed every page:
- Pay Transparency. Workers anonymously report real pay packages — hourly + per diem + OT. Each report benchmarks against BLS median wages so a worker instantly sees if an offer is above, at, or below market.
- Contractor Reviews. Anonymous ratings on pay, safety, management, culture. Paired with auto-generated OSHA safety scores from federal enforcement data.
- Housing Directory. Two-sided marketplace. Workers recommend places they've stayed; property owners list rentals at $199/year. Every listing shows a GSA per diem comparison so workers know if the price is fair.
- Area Intel. Workers rate locations across nine categories — cost of living, housing, things to do, food, safety, cell coverage, weather, people, jobs. Each location gets a composite Road Score from 0–100.
Think Glassdoor meets Furnished Finder, built for the construction industry's 500K traveling workers.
Why I built it
Traveling trades workers make $150K decisions with zero information. They commit to a contract — pay, location, contractor, housing — before they have any data on whether any of it is good. The industry runs on word of mouth, Facebook groups, and guesswork. The cost of bad information lands on the worker; the existing platforms don't care.
The asymmetry is fixable. The federal government already publishes most of the data the worker needs — BLS wages, OSHA enforcement, Davis-Bacon prevailing wages, GSA per diem rates — and nobody had compiled it into something a worker could actually use.
What shipped
A full-stack two-sided marketplace, zero to production in a single dev sprint:
- 270+ server-rendered SEO pages with real government wage data — 17 trades × 51 states.
- 4,850 BLS wage records, 4,171 Davis-Bacon wage determinations, 346 GSA per diem city records seeded from federal sources.
- Automated content engine generating data-driven articles from the government dataset — n8n workflows + Claude API + a Postgres content registry preventing duplicate generation.
- Paid host portal with Stripe integration: $199/year recurring subscriptions, webhook-driven subscription lifecycle, Customer Portal for self-serve cancellation.
- Dynamic OG images, JSON-LD structured data, and sitemap generation — every wage lookup, contractor profile, and housing page is server-rendered and indexable.
Stack
- Frontend — Next.js 14 (App Router), React, Tailwind CSS.
- Auth — Firebase Authentication (Google OAuth + email/password).
- User-generated data — Firebase Firestore (reviews, pay reports, housing, profiles).
- Government data — Supabase (Postgres) for BLS wages, OSHA inspections, Davis-Bacon rates, GSA per diem.
- Payments — Stripe Checkout + Customer Portal + webhook subscription lifecycle.
- Hosting — Vercel with ISR for SEO pages.
- Content automation — n8n + Claude API + Postgres content registry.
- Design system — "Iron Asphalt" — dark mode, 0px border radius, safety-orange accents, Space Grotesk + Inter.
Built solo with Claude as a daily collaborator across every layer — schema design, the content automation pipeline, the Stripe webhook flow, the SEO posture, the design system itself. The split-database architecture was a 30-minute call in a pair session: fast writes and offline support on Firestore for user content, complex joins and percentile math on Postgres for federal data. One conversation, two systems, both correct.
Key design decisions
- Government data as cold-start solution. Most review platforms launch empty and beg the first user to contribute. RoadHand launches with 500K+ federal data points already loaded — a worker gets value before a single review is submitted.
- SEO-first acquisition. The content is the channel. "Electrician pay North Dakota" ranks on Google; the worker arrives on the platform organically. No paid acquisition until the SEO floor is real.
- Platform, not party. RoadHand never touches rent payments, employment agreements, or contractor relationships. Protects the business legally and keeps the platform neutral.
- Workers free. Hosts pay. Workers use the platform free, always. Property hosts pay $199/year flat — no commission, no booking fees. Future monetization: premium worker features, staffing company partnerships, featured contractor listings.
Why this matters
RoadHand is the studio venture that demonstrates the operating model — solo founder, Claude as daily collaborator — at full surface area: marketplace economics, federal-data ETL, content automation, paid SaaS billing, full SEO posture. Every layer was built and shipped in a single sprint that would have been a six-month project on a traditional team.
The discipline isn't "AI replaces the team." It's the operating model collapses to one person with the right kit. That kit — opinionated primitives like Agent Parts, the design discipline from a decade of design engineering, Claude in the loop on every layer — is what I bring to fractional engagements.