Six months ago I had an idea for a local business audit tool. Today I'm running four live products on a single VPS, sending hundreds of outreach emails a week, and still writing most of the code myself. Here's what that actually looks like.
The Products
LocalMention is an AI visibility audit for local businesses. It checks whether a business shows up when people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview for recommendations — and generates a detailed report showing exactly where they're visible and where they're not.
FixMyRecord is a personal reputation scanner. It checks data broker sites, background check databases, and court record aggregators for personal information exposure, then automates the removal process.
Resilience is a gamified reentry support platform — quest systems, skill trees, and mentor oversight designed to make the transition from incarceration to stability feel achievable. Built on React and Supabase.
SetupLens is a stock scanner that runs five different trading methodology lenses against the market every day and surfaces the highest-conviction setups.
The Stack
Everything runs on one Vultr VPS:
- Reverse proxy: Nginx
- Process management: systemd services
- Scheduling: cron jobs for daily scans, email sends, backups
- Databases: SQLite (simple, no server overhead)
- Backups: Nightly to Backblaze B2, weekly offsite
- Backend: Python (Flask), Node.js
- Frontend: React, Vite, Tailwind
- Auth/DB (Resilience): Supabase with Row-Level Security
- Browser automation: Playwright (FixMyRecord scans)
- Email: Resend (transactional), Instantly (cold outreach)
When you can't throw money at scaling problems, you learn to write efficient code. Every decision gets scrutinized: does this need a database? Can this run as a cron job instead of a daemon? Is this complexity serving users or just my ego?
What the Data Taught Me About Cold Outreach
Over 600 cold emails sent for LocalMention. Open rate: 4.5%. Replies: 1. The numbers are humbling, but they're data.
| Business Type | Open Rate |
|---|---|
| Law firms | 75% |
| Home cleaning | 50% |
| Plumbers | 33% |
| Dentists | 25% |
Cold outreach isn't a marketing problem — it's a product problem. The emails that get opened are the ones where the audit report reveals something the business owner genuinely didn't know.
Applied Behavioral Science
My academic background is in behavioral science — University of New Mexico, MATEO Lab, health behavior change interventions. Every product I build uses the same principles: reduce friction, make the next action obvious, show progress visually.
FixMyRecord's live results page updates in real-time as the scan runs. Resilience uses quest chains that break overwhelming goals into daily actions. LocalMention's PDF report is designed to create an "aha moment" in the first 30 seconds.
What I'd Do Differently
Fewer products. More depth. If I could rewind six months, I'd pick one product and go all-in: more verticals, more cities, a real sales process, testimonials from the first ten customers before building anything else.
But the cross-pollination between projects is real — FixMyRecord's scan architecture informed LocalMention's pipeline, trading methodology shaped how I think about signal-to-noise in outreach, and Resilience keeps me grounded in the human impact behind the code.
One server, four products, and a lot of coffee.
I'm Fillip Kosorukov — solo founder, UNM grad, and builder. Find me at fillipkosorukov.net or LocalMention.io.
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