Slatebell
Slatebell started from a personal dispute with a landlord over a security deposit, which led me down a rabbit hole into just how specific and unforgiving Massachusetts security deposit law (M.G.L. c. 186 §15B) is (escrow receipts, itemized damage lists, statements of condition), and how a landlord who misses any of those procedural requirements can be forced to forfeit the deposit entirely or pay treble damages. Most tenants have no idea those rules exist, so I built a tool that does the analysis for them: answer a handful of questions and get an instant, ungated read on which violations apply and what's recoverable. The paid Dispute Kit ($49) goes further, generating a demand letter that combines the deposit statute with Massachusetts' Consumer Protection Act (Chapter 93A, which carries a stronger 30-day response window), and can send it via USPS Certified Mail with tracking, no printer or post office trip required. If the landlord doesn't respond, it also generates a pre-filled small-claims court form as a fallback. This is a live, revenue-generating product, not a demo: real Stripe charges, real certified letters sent through Lob, real paying customers. The statute logic lives in a rules engine that encodes the actual law as pure, unit-tested functions, each violation carrying its citation and plain-English explanation, checked against primary sources before shipping and structured so supporting a second state is a new module rather than a rewrite. The whole stack (Stripe for payment, Lob for physical mail, Resend for email) is wired with graceful degradation so a paying customer always gets their product even if a downstream provider hiccups. I scoped, built, and shipped it solo, and I'm currently in a marketing and validation phase (running paid search tests and watching the funnel), deliberately holding off on new features until real usage tells me what's worth building next.