A multi-stage study of small US home-services businesses — HVAC installers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, landscapers, cleaners and adjacent trades — 1-10 employees or owner-operated, independent (no franchises, no chains). The commercial case: these businesses win work locally, yet a large share have no website, a social page instead of a site, or a free website-builder page. Each is a concrete, verifiable signal — and a concrete offer: build or upgrade their web presence. Below: how we define the audience, how we score it, and the curated batches as they ship.
Where the data comes from — and why it can be trusted
prepared 2026-07-08 · MEASURED · Outricher data · stage 1 of a multi-stage series
Four hard gates, in order. Everything that fails a gate is counted and reported — the funnel is fully observable.
Granular trades are classified from company names and descriptions — generic industry labels alone miss most of this market.
Sweet-spot size (2-10), trade named right in the company name, residential focus, local presence, established business, high-density metro bonus (TX · FL · CA · AZ · GA · NC).
Inverted vs the usual logic: no website scores highest (build offer), then social-page-as-site, then free-builder pages (upgrade offer), then own domain (redesign pitch). Derived from the company record itself — measured, zero-cost, verifiable.
Decision-maker identified, email and phone coverage from enrichment, social presence, active company page.
| Stage | Count | Dropped | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| US companies, 7 anchor industry segments | 70,471 | — | index-anchored pull |
| Sized 1-10 employees | 29,518 | -40,953 | size gate (8,833 unknown-size held as reserve) |
| Independent (franchise guard) | 29,245 | -273 | brand registry + unit-number patterns |
| Trade-classified | 11,494 | -17,743 | 12-category taxonomy on name + description |
| Owners resolved, scored above threshold | 8,736 | — | decision maker found, merged, deduped, contact-augmented |
| Curated lead pool (stage 1) | 1,000 | — | top combined score (76-105, avg 81) · all validation gates green |
Reserve pools for follow-up batches: 8,833 unknown-size US companies with trade signals; solo practitioners surfaced person-side; adjacent industry segments not yet swept.
Six strategy slices over the validated pool (8,736 scored leads + the unknown-size reserve). Each batch answers the same question a different way: who most needs a website built or rebuilt? Every batch ships as a dataset — score-ranked, per-company cap 2, franchise guard re-verified.
Companies whose only web presence is nothing, a social page, or a free-builder page. The hottest possible audience for "we will build your site" — the need is visible in the data, not assumed. Includes 28 leads surfaced from the unknown-size reserve sweep.
A domain exists, but the digital presence is thin: under 25 followers, micro business. The pitch flips to "your site is losing you jobs" — and this segment has the best contacts in the whole pool.
The highest-ticket trade in the set; seasonal demand spikes reward a booking-ready site. Hot and dormant web tiers ranked first inside the batch.
Emergency-call trades — the customer picks whoever looks credible in a five-minute search, which makes the website THE storefront.
Big-ticket, photo-driven trade — before/after galleries convert, and most existing sites cannot show them.
Recurring-revenue trades — a site with a quote form turns one-off jobs into subscriptions. Strongest contact coverage among the trade batches.
What the reserve sweep taught us (measured). The 8,833 unknown-size companies looked like a promising no-website hunting ground — 1,290 have no site at all. But they resolve to reachable owners poorly: 320 qualified companies yielded only 33 owners (28 leads). No employee count usually means no people on the company record either. The lesson: the professional-profile-presence floor does the real filtering, and the sized pool is where the value is.
Why "no website" is measured and not assumed. Every company record carries its declared web presence. We tier it: absent → social page (facebook/instagram/linktree as the only web address) → free website builders (wixsite, godaddysites, weebly, wordpress.com and 20 more) → own domain. The first three tiers are the hot market for a build offer; own-domain companies get an improvement pitch instead. The tier is recomputed at every batch build, and the franchise guard re-runs on the final pool as a validation gate — leak count must be zero for a batch to ship.
Every batch above ships on request — and the batches are not the ceiling. Behind them sits the full validated pool: 8,736 scored leads plus the unknown-size reserve. We can cut it to fit your offer — one trade, one state or metro, no-website-only, phone-first records — or rescore the entire pool against a different pitch. Contacts are re-verified at delivery time; a missing email ships as empty, never guessed.