Most hackathon projects don't have a customer before they're finished.
InspectIQ does.
Before I wrote a single line of code, I had a conversation with REBS Property Specialist LLC — a licensed Florida home inspector with 30 years of experience.
I asked him one question: what's the most painful part of your job that software hasn't fixed?
His answer was immediate: the report.
The problem nobody talks about
Florida has over 8,000 licensed home inspectors. After every inspection, which covers 12 sections, dozens of condition items, and photos of every defect, the inspector has to produce a professional PDF report and deliver it to the client, often within hours.
Most inspectors are still doing this with paper forms, clipboards, and software that was built before smartphones existed. The apps that do exist weren't designed for mobile. They weren't designed for field use. They weren't designed for someone who needs to capture 40 findings, take 20 photos, and generate a branded PDF while standing in someone's attic in July in Florida.
That's the problem InspectIQ solves.
What I built
InspectIQ is a mobile-first SaaS platform that covers the full inspection workflow:
In the field: the inspector opens the app on their phone, selects a section (Roof, Electrical, Plumbing, etc.), and starts documenting. Every finding has a condition rating (GOOD, MARGINAL, DEFECTIVE), free-form observations, and photos that upload directly from the phone to S3 — no waiting for a slow backend upload.
Component observations: beyond free-form findings, each section has structured metadata fields (what material is the roof? what type of electrical panel?) and condition items that map directly to the InterNACHI inspection standard Florida inspectors are trained on.
The report: one click generates a professional PDF with the inspector's branding — their logo, their colors, their license numbers — plus all the findings, conditions, photos, and section disclaimers. WeasyPrint renders it server-side in under 3 seconds.
The distribution insight
Here's what made me confident this could work as a real business:
REBS runs an inspection school. Every year, 30 to 60 new inspectors graduate from his program and enter the Florida market. They need software from day one of their career. If InspectIQ is the tool they learn on, the CAC for those customers is essentially zero, they come through the school channel already trained on the product.
That's not a hackathon pitch. That's a real distribution channel.
Building it during H0
The H0 Hackathon gave me the infrastructure constraint I needed: Aurora PostgreSQL on AWS with a Vercel frontend. That's exactly the stack I wanted for production anyway.
So instead of building a demo, I built the real thing. Multi-tenant database with Row Level Security. White-label branding per inspector. A 5-state inspection lifecycle with write-locks on delivered reports. S3 photo storage with presigned URLs. Thirteen database migrations.
It's not a prototype. It's a product.
Where it stands today
InspectIQ is live at mcag-h0.vercel.app. REBS confirmed at $99/month starting July 2026. His network of 3-5 inspectors are next in the pipeline.
The MRR targets: $500 in month 1, $5,000 by month 6, $30,000 by month 18.
The path to get there runs through every inspector school in Florida.
I created this content for the purposes of entering the H0: Hack the Zero Stack
Hackathon by AWS and Vercel. #H0Hackathon
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