Building Spotlight Contractor — a real AI app, built the way this book teaches

This is a real application. It's live right now, and you can use it before you finish reading this post. That's not a gimmick — it's the point.

Spotlight Contractor Edition is an AI marketing platform for home improvement pros. A contractor answers a few questions about their business. The AI writes their ads, finds their customers, and launches their campaign — in about ten minutes. No dashboards, no jargon, no learning curve.

But the app is easy to admire and hard to copy. What follows is the process that produced it — the same scope-first method from The AI Advantage for Home Service Businesses, applied end to end. You're about to watch the method work on a real asset.

The problem: marketing that lives in the gaps

Every contractor knows this story by heart:

• Marketing happens between jobs — a Facebook post here, a Nextdoor mention there, a flyer that never quite gets made.
• Referrals are the best customers, but referrals only happen when the phone rings, and the phone only rings when people remember you.
• Ads fail not because contractors don't know their business, but because the ad platforms are built for marketing agencies — not for a crew lead who just finished a 12-hour day.

That's the Four Losses from Chapter 3, concentrated into one industry: time lost fighting ad tools, knowledge lost (the good stories stay in the owner's head), money lost on ads that don't sound like the business, and opportunity lost on leads nobody followed up.

The one-page map

Chapter 2's exercise: draw the whole business on one piece of paper. For a contractor, that map looks like this:

1. Homeowner sees an ad or a review
2. Homeowner calls or fills a form
3. Phone tag. Estimate scheduled.
4. Estimate given — and here's where it stalls
5. Follow-up (usually none, or one awkward call)
6. Job booked, job done, invoice sent
7. If they're happy, maybe a review — if they remember

The binding constraint jumps off that map: everything between step 1 and step 4 is manual, inconsistent, and mostly skipped. The before/afters and the "we finished Tuesday, here's the reveal" moments never reach the people deciding between three bids.

The entire build exists to lift that one constraint.

Design what good looks like

Before a single line of code, "fixed" had to be defined. The acceptance criteria:

• A contractor who can describe their business in plain English launches a campaign in under 10 minutes.
• The AI writes the ad copy, imagery, and targeting from their answers — no copywriting skill required.
• The owner sees the whole picture in one place: leads in, cost per lead, what's working.
• It speaks the trade's language. A roofer, a kitchen remodeler, and a basement finisher get different campaigns because they are different campaigns.

Measurable. Testable with a stopwatch. That's what makes a scope buildable.

The extraction interview

Chapter 8's interview pulls the knowledge out of the owner's head and into the system. Seven questions, each mapped to something the AI needs:

• "What do you do?" → Business Category
• "Where do you work?" → Service area
• "What are you offering?" → The campaign's offer
• "Why should someone pick you?" → Proof and trust
• "How should you sound?" → Brand voice

Seven questions. No repeats, no waste. Every input has a purpose; every output traces back to an input.

The build

The stack is exactly what Chapter 19 recommends:

• Frontend: Next.js on Vercel — the wizard, dashboard, and landing pages
• Backend: FastAPI on Railway — campaign logic, lead tracking, integrations
• AI images: FAL.ai — ad creatives from the contractor's project description
• Ads: a Meta Ads pipeline that turns the campaign into real targeting
• Data: PostgreSQL behind per-user accounts

Every one of these services is set up step by step in the free Setup Guide. The stack isn't secret — the advantage isn't the tools, it's knowing what each one is for and how to wire them together.

The 7-step wizard

The heart of the app. It walks a contractor from "what do you do" to "your campaign is live":

1. Business Category — Remodeling, Restoration, Hybrid, General Contractor, or Specialty Trade
2. Business Basics — name, contact, service area, hours
3. Business Details — the specifics that make a campaign real
4. Services Checklist — which services they actually offer
5. Proof & Trust — reviews, credentials, guarantees
6. Brand Voice & Goal — how they sound, what the campaign should achieve
7. Review & Complete — everything in one place, then launch

Each step is a narrow question with clear options. The owner never faces a blank page — they face choices they already know the answers to. The software asks, the AI writes, the contractor approves.

The dashboard

After launch, the owner lives in three numbers: the lead funnel (who came in, where they are), active campaigns (what's running, what it cost, cost per lead), and recent activity (a living feed — "new lead 2 min ago," "deal closed — $12,500").

The dashboard's job is to replace "are my ads working?" with a screen that answers it before it's asked.

The proof: use it yourself

Here's the part no other case study does. The app is live. Go use it.

spotlight-contractor.vercel.app

Click "Start Your First Campaign." Pick a business category. Walk the seven steps. Watch the AI turn your answers into a campaign. Then look at the dashboard.

Ten minutes. No credit card. That's the entire value proposition — and you just experienced it.

The results

Measured against the binding constraint:

• Before: marketing lived in the owner's head. Ads were sporadic, follow-up was luck, and the photos that win bids were buried in a phone.
• After: the same owner answers seven questions and has a live campaign — AI-written copy, generated imagery, targeting — in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

The system doesn't claim to do marketing for you. It makes marketing possible for a person who has a business to run.

Your turn

You've now watched the process produce a working, live application — and you used it with your own hands. The book gives you the map. The build — the extraction interview, the scope, the wiring of ten services into one system — is where the work lives.

That's exactly what the book and the bonus course are for. The AI Advantage for Home Service Businesses teaches the whole method — the Four Losses, build-ready specs, standing up your agent team, the development stack. And the free bonus course, Building Spotlight Contractor, walks you through this exact case study module by module, with a recap quiz at every step and a live app to play with.

Get the book + the free bonus course — or start with the first 30 pages free.

Spotlight Contractor Edition is a demonstration of the process described in The AI Advantage for Home Service Businesses. Campaign data shown is sample data for illustration. The platform and process are real.