Date: 2026-10-13 (5:53 PM EDT, ~5 min) Attendees: Michael Houck (michael@ryevalley.co), Emil Barr (not on the Granola participant list; identified from the title and transcript) Granola: https://notes.granola.ai/d/92623e2d-f176-4430-9bba-9b24689c2e4e
Context: debrief right after the Mode Mobile pilot scoping call. GovGrid is Emil’s business; not a Rye Valley decision. Pilot revenue target and contractor rate are in Owner tier.
Summary
- Goal: Michael wants to keep stacking buyer calls toward 4 to 5 pilots in the next month (target in restricted).
- Public records request tool: first real human reply received; the request read as genuine, raised no alarms, and was routed to the right place.
- Bugs: top fix is filter by status (clicking “replied” should show only replied contacts in the queue search, and those should open in the inbox; this was not working in Michael’s test). Functionality before aesthetics.
- Next big step: train Hermes on the SOP Will and Michael wrote, and scale from the 8 example requests to 100 to 200 requests. Emil estimates under a day of work.
- Bottleneck: domain setup is manual (Google cannot be automated), 7 to 8 domains live today, pilots would need hundreds or thousands. Options: look at Thor’s Hammer (done-for-you cold email inbox/domain service) or hire a dedicated low-cost Philippines-based contractor. Emil has 4 past contractors in the Philippines he can loop in once access/permissions are sorted. Michael offered to pay for it.
- Bear vs bull case (Emil): bear case is a short-term run of requests and extraction; bull case is real agency partnerships and ongoing data pipelines that can be sold.
Decisions
- Operating priority for the week: functionality fixes (filter by status first), then SOP-driven scale-up of requests. Routine prioritization, no decision page.
Action items
- Emil: fix the inbox filter-by-status bug (prioritize Oct 14)
- Emil: train Hermes on the Will/Michael SOP and send 100 to 200 requests
- Emil: loop in a Philippines-based contractor for domain setup after resolving Google access issues
- Michael: optionally look into Thor’s Hammer as a done-for-you alternative
Notable transcript excerpts
Michael on priority:
“It doesn’t have to be like a masterpiece, but I think that should be like the first thing to fix so that we can just like see who’s replied.”
Emil on the real bottleneck:
“The big time suck with this on the technical side is not even really a technical thing. It is just setting up these domains because like you can’t automate it because of the way that, you know, Google works.”
Emil on the first reply:
“At least like the request came off real, didn’t raise any alarms, and it’s getting to the right place.”
Full transcript in Granola: https://notes.granola.ai/d/92623e2d-f176-4430-9bba-9b24689c2e4e