35 million US local businesses. Ranked nightly. Tracked by one solo founder on a Mac Mini in Hawaii. No venture capital. No growth team. No ads.
Local businesses are where most Americans actually work. The plumber in your neighborhood. The dentist down the block. The HVAC shop that saved you in August. These are the companies that keep a city running.
They're also the companies the internet has mostly abandoned. They get pitched software by 40 different vendors a week. They pay $400 a month for a CRM they barely use. They're told they need SEO, then PPC, then Yelp ads, then Google ads, then TikTok, then AI search. Meanwhile they're trying to dispatch three trucks and answer 60 calls before lunch.
The tools built for them are built by people who have never worked at them.
Operator exists because AI finally makes it possible to build software that understands what a local business actually does. Not a dashboard with 40 metrics. A single feed of what matters today, written in plain English, every morning by an agent that never sleeps. Kai.
The data layer is free forever. 35 million businesses, every US city, every trade, ranked nightly. Anyone can look up their shop, their block, their competitor. That's the promise.
If you want Kai to run your business for you, that's Autopilot. Five agents. $499 a month. One flat price, no tiers, no per seat, no upsells. Cancel in one tap and export everything in one click.
Most local software companies have the incentive structure backwards. They charge you monthly to hold your data hostage. Operator does the opposite. The data is yours. The AI is a tool. The price is flat.
Operator will never take a priced round from a VC. VCs need 10x returns which means selling to one person for 100x, not 100,000 people for 1x. The small business customer loses every time.
No paid acquisition. No referral bounties. No affiliate tiers. Customers find Operator through the directory and the product earns them. If the product isn't good enough to earn customers that way, the answer is a better product, not a paid funnel.
One founder. AI agents handle everything else. When we hit $20K MRR, we might hire a second person, or we might not. Fewer people means more clarity, faster shipping, lower prices for customers.
$499 a month is $499 a month. No per seat, no per location, no overage charges, no upgrade to Pro for the feature you actually want. One tier, everything included, the price you lock in is the price you pay as long as you're a customer.
One tap cancel, one click export. Your data is never used to train anyone else's model. Your AI visibility data is not sold to Google. Your reviews are not held hostage. If Operator ever stops being the best choice for you, leaving is easy.
Built in Hawaii, surfed around, tested on the hardest small business market in the country (small population, extreme seasonality, supply chain that costs double). If it works here, it works anywhere.
Hi, I'm Brent. I built Operator from a desk in Honolulu on a Mac Mini and a Mac Studio. Before this, I built Vinovest, a wine and whiskey investment platform that grew to roughly $100M in assets under management (acquired by StartEngine in March 2026). I was an early-stage investor in Zencastr. I angel invest in a handful of Hawaii-based startups.
Operator is the company I wish someone had built for my parents. They ran small businesses their whole lives and spent too many nights dealing with software that fought them instead of helping them.
If you are a small business owner in Hawaii or anywhere else, I want to know what you actually need. Every feature in Operator came from someone emailing me about a problem. Keep them coming.
brent@operator.fyi
Free forever. 35 million US businesses ranked nightly. Find yours, claim it, get your Health Score, watch your rank.