I’m Chris Hsieh. I built Restaurant Signal here in Austin.

Right now there’s a restaurant opening in your city. It needs your service, and it needs to find someone this week.

But you’ll probably never hear about it.

A buddy of mine works at a small pest control company in Houston. I asked him once how they find new customers. He said “The Yellow Pages.” That’s it. Not because he’s behind, but because there just isn’t an easy way for him to find out who actually needs his service. So he waits for the phone to ring, while dozens of restaurants open in his city every week, every one of them choosing vendors without him.

And here’s how new restaurants choose. They’ve got inspections coming, inventory to order, a dozen people to talk to. They’re buried. So whoever gets to them first usually gets the job, and ends up staying for years, even if they were never the best fit.

Both sides are looking. Neither one has an easy way to see the other.

I went and looked at what’s already out there. Companies that sell new restaurant leads.

You can’t even find out how many leads you’d get without getting on a sales call first. Most just throw a big pile of raw data at you and tell you good luck. Some make you sign annual contracts, or have some type of online portal you’d have to spend hours learning how to use. Others say it straight out, in writing: if you’re not happy with the leads, you cannot get your money back.

Read that again. You pay them, the leads are bad, and that’s your problem.

And go read what their customers say about them. The top complaint isn’t the price. It’s that the phone numbers don’t even work.

I get why it happens. It’s easy to grab a giant pile of names, make you pay for them, and just dump them in your lap. It’s expensive and hard to check whether any of them are real. So they just sell big volume to big companies, not to you and me.

Their service was never built to make our lives easier.

Here’s what really got me, though. All of it was free the whole time. Every restaurant in Texas files paperwork with the state before it can open. Names, addresses, dates. Public record. Anybody can go look at it.

It’s just sitting in a giant government database that nobody with a business to run is ever going to sit down and dig through.

• Pending Original New Primary and Subordinate License Application(s)Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission · businesses that applied for a license and haven’t opened yet
• Active Sales Tax Permit HoldersTexas Comptroller of Public Accounts · every business registered to collect sales tax, brand-new ones included

I spent fifteen years in restaurants, then seven years writing software. I’ve been on both sides of this, and I knew exactly what was missing. Something simple and honest.

Turns out, one email was enough. It’s an email subscription. You sign up once, and every week a list of already verified new restaurants in your city shows up in your inbox. That’s it.

Remember that restaurant opening in your city? The one that needs your service, but you have no idea who they are?

Imagine if you did.

And what if you knew about every other new restaurant that needs your service too? Every week, in your city, when they’re still opening, still early, before they’ve picked anybody.

One call at the right time is all it takes. And you’ve got a customer who pays you every month, for years, and never thinks about leaving.

Good news. That list is already built. Names, addresses, phone numbers, already verified, already sorted, in your inbox every Monday morning.

Still want to wait for the phone to ring?

You’re one click from your next customer.