// jays.website / architecture / business

Business Intelligence, Under the Hood

Map data in, market gaps out. Nearly 10,000 Massachusetts businesses organized into 274 zones, analyzed for what's there — and more importantly, what's systematically missing. Then the proof: the same pipeline productized into a live directory business.

The Pipeline
OpenStreetMap extract→ geocode + zone rollup→ sector-gap analysis→ curiosity zones→ zone explorer→ directory factory

The analysis answers "where are services missing?" — the directory factory turns that answer into products.

Analysis Engine

Finding what isn't there

Density · Diversity · Gaps

Data in

  • OpenStreetMap business data across Massachusetts ZIP codes, towns, and counties
  • Coordinate-bounds filtering rejects mis-geocoded records before they reach the map — a real bug class this pipeline hit and fixed
  • Zone definitions roll businesses up to 274 comparable areas

Processing

  • Per-zone industry density and diversity metrics establish what "normal" looks like for a zone of that size and type
  • Sector-gap analysis compares each zone against its peers to find missing industries
  • A curiosity score ranks zones where services are systematically absent relative to comparable zones — each with its top missing industries

Out

  • Zone explorer with sector breakdowns and town-level drill-down
  • Interactive spatial view of the full dataset
  • A ranked answer to "where would a new service business face the least competition?"
9,862
Businesses
274
Zones
14
Counties
Productization

The directory factory

Analysis → Product

The proof

  • The Powerwash Directory — a live niche directory for exterior-cleaning companies, built from this pipeline's playbook
  • 1,445 companies across 20 city pages, each with structured service data
  • Runs on a modern stack: Next.js frontend, hosted Postgres, deployed at the edge

The factory pattern

  • All vertical-specific content — brand, copy, services, FAQs — lives in a single config file
  • Launching a new vertical means cloning the template, editing one config, and pointing it at a fresh database
  • Each vertical gets its own isolated database, so directories never share failure modes

Why it matters

  • The intelligence layer picks the market; the factory ships the product — the same loop, repeatable per vertical
  • Directory sites are static-fast and cheap to run, matching the rest of the suite's economics
  • The gap analysis above is the targeting system for which vertical and which cities come next
1,445
Companies listed
20
City pages
1
Config per vertical

Explore the zones live, or step back to the full systems tour.

Business Intel → ← All architecture