# Kevin Rhys, Director of Business Development at Tradeworks Supply Co. — read of Skilled Trades License Tracker, June 19 2026

> 11 years in B2B sales and BD, currently managing outbound for a 90-person regional tool distributor out of Columbus. We sell to independent electricians, plumbers, HVAC shops. I coach U10 soccer Saturdays and listen to way too many sales-adjacent podcasts on my drive in.

## How I got here

I was searching "newly licensed contractor leads database" on a Tuesday morning before my first call. We've been burning through ZoomInfo lists that are 18 months stale and I'm tired of cold calling guys who retired in 2023. A Reddit thread on r/saleshackers mentioned that state license boards publish new registrant data but nobody aggregates it cleanly. I clicked through three or four links and this one showed up. I thought it was a SaaS tool I could just subscribe to.

## What I clicked first

The hero headline pulled me in: "Daily Feed of Newly Licensed Contractors and Tradespeople." That is exactly the itch I have. New licensees are the highest-intent moment we could possibly catch. So I read the feature list top to bottom. "Geographic Filtering. Pre-filter by trade type, state, ZIP code, and time-to-market readiness." Yep. That is the product I have been looking for for two years.

Then I hit "Direct Contact Append. Email, phone number, and business address data appended in real time without additional lookups required." I actually opened a new tab to find a pricing page because I assumed this was a live product.

## Where I paused

The scoring section stopped me cold. "64/100 Adoptability. $-4,400 Year-1 take-home (Fermi). 1 in 6 Meaningful-success odds (Fermi)."

Negative take-home and one-in-six odds. I read that twice. I have never seen a product page voluntarily show you the probability that it fails. That is either the most honest thing I have ever read on the internet or it is a clever hook to make me feel like I am in on something. I genuinely could not tell which.

## What I distrusted

Two things:

First, the whole frame of the page flipped on me halfway through. I came here looking to BUY a data feed. By the time I got to "Adopt this idea / Unlock for $5 / Adopt for $99 / Operator partnership Custom," I realized I was not looking at a live product at all. I was looking at a strategy kit for someone who wants to BUILD this. The feature list up top reads like a SaaS product. The bottom half reads like a business-in-a-box offer. That mismatch cost them my attention for about 30 seconds while I reoriented.

Second: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." I respect the honesty but this also means the "Daily License Board Feed" and "LinkedIn Profile Enrichment" described in the features... do not exist yet. Those are the features of the thing someone would build. Not of something I can log into next Tuesday.

## What would convince me

If someone actually built this and ran it for 60 days, I want to see: how many net-new licensee records per week in a mid-sized state like Ohio or Tennessee, the actual match rate on LinkedIn profile enrichment (ZoomInfo claims 85% and delivers 40%), and one specific example of a company that cold-outreached newly licensed contractors and what conversion looked like compared to their existing list.

I do not need a logo wall. I need one real number from one real user who tried this on their actual territory.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. Is there any version of this that already pulls live data, even a prototype or manual pilot? Or is the entire product still in the "idea" phase right now?
2. If I paid the $99 and adopted this build, how long realistically before I had a working daily feed for Ohio? What is actually in the code starter?
3. The page says "all 50 state licensing databases" but those are not standardized at all. Some states have clean public APIs, some have PDFs behind a CAPTCHA. What is your actual coverage plan for the messiest states?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The concept is the exact product I want to buy. But the page is selling me a blueprint to build it, which is a completely different ask. If someone has actually built this and is running it, I would reply to that email the same day. Right now I am sitting with it.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-19. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*