* Revenue figures are market-based estimates only and are not guarantees of income. Actual results will vary based on execution, market conditions, and individual effort. This is not financial or investment advice.
How the agent runs it
The CEO orchestrator agent assigns incoming research requests to specialist agents who independently scrape public records, voting histories, campaign finance filings, and social media, then synthesize structured candidate profiles and voter guides. Completed deliverables are auto-formatted, quality-scored, and emailed directly to subscribing clients — local news sites, civic nonprofits, and campaign opposition research desks — on a subscription or per-report basis. The system monitors election calendars autonomously to proactively pitch clients ahead of filing deadlines and election cycles without human prompting.
Who this is for
The ideal owner has a background in political science, journalism, or civic tech and already has relationships with local news editors, campaign managers, or good-government nonprofits who would be early buyers. They are comfortable with light API configuration and Airtable setup but do not need to write code. This suits someone who wants to run a mission-aligned business — improving civic transparency — while benefiting from near-total operational automation.
Market opportunity
There are over 500,000 elected offices in the United States, yet fewer than 20% of municipal races receive any meaningful media coverage due to newsroom budget cuts — creating a massive unmet demand for affordable, fast voter research. The 2026 midterm cycle and hundreds of 2025 municipal elections create immediate, time-sensitive buying urgency. The combination of public-records digitization and LLM synthesis now makes sub-$1,000 hyperlocal candidate profiling economically viable for the first time.
Boss agent: RECTOR (Research & Editorial Coordinator)
RECTOR ingests the election calendar, prioritizes the research queue by deadline urgency, assigns tasks to specialist agents, validates output quality scores before delivery, and escalates any flagged legal-sensitivity items to the human owner.
- ■ No profile is delivered with a confidence score below 85% — low-confidence claims are either sourced or removed before send
- ■ All claims must link to a verifiable public record URL — no inference presented as established fact
- ■ Client delivery SLA of 48 hours is enforced; any job overdue by 12 hours triggers an automatic human-owner Slack alert
The agent team
Human touchpoints
// the only things that still need you
- 👤 Legal review and signature on the master service agreement template, which governs liability disclaimers, accuracy warranties, and intended-use restrictions for all clients
- 👤 Approving delivery of any research report that RECTOR has flagged as legally sensitive — specifically any profile where the SYNTHESIS Agent detected a potential criminal allegation, active litigation, or defamation-risk language
- 👤 Authorizing new state expansions that require manual registration of a new business entity or require review of that state's specific public-records access laws before scraping begins
Tech stack
Monetization
Clients pay a monthly subscription tier ($299–$999/mo) for ongoing coverage of a defined geographic area, plus à la carte deep-dive opposition research reports at $199–$499 each. Revenue scales by adding counties, states, or issue-based research verticals without adding headcount.
Key risks
- → Accuracy liability: A factual error in a published candidate profile could expose the business to defamation claims from local politicians who have legal resources and motivation to sue.
- → Election cycle revenue concentration: Revenue spikes sharply near election season (Oct–Nov, March primaries) and collapses in off-years, requiring proactive pipeline-building or product diversification to smooth cash flow.
Getting started
- 1 Identify and sign three anchor clients firstBefore building anything, email five local news editors or civic league directors offering free sample candidate profiles for their next local election. A single paid subscriber at $499/mo validates the model and funds tool subscriptions.
- 2 Map public data sources for your target stateIdentify the specific URLs for your state's campaign finance portal, secretary of state voter registration data, and county meeting minutes archives. These become the hardcoded scraping targets for the Intake Agent — this research takes 2–4 hours and is done once per state.
- 3 Configure Apify scrapers for core data sourcesBuild Apify actors for the three to five public record sources identified above — campaign finance filings, voting records, and council meeting minutes. Test outputs into Airtable so the Research Agent has clean, structured data to synthesize rather than raw HTML.
- 4 Prompt-engineer the Research and Writer agentsBuild the Claude Managed Agent prompts for the Research Agent (fact extraction, source citation, confidence scoring) and Writer Agent (voter-guide tone vs. opposition-brief tone) using three real candidate profiles as few-shot examples. This is the core IP of the business.
- 5 Set up Stripe billing and Resend delivery pipelineCreate two Stripe subscription products (Basic and Pro tiers) and wire the delivery pipeline so that completed reports automatically trigger a branded Resend email to the client. This closes the loop from research request to paid delivery with zero human handling.
// done for you
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AutoElect: Autonomous Municipal Candidate Research Bureau
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