Power Outage Notification & Community Network

When major power outages happen (like the recent 70k-customer NV Energy outage), people can't find information and emergency services are overwhelmed. Build a crowdsourced app where users report outages, share real-time updates, and find nearby generators, shelters, and resources.

Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and utilities have been slow to modernize outage communication, creating a real gap between what official channels provide and what affected residents actually need in the moment. Citizen-driven platforms like Waze proved the crowdsourced local data model works, and no clear incumbent owns this specific niche — PG&E and similar utilities have outage maps but they're notoriously delayed and utility-specific, leaving multi-utility or unaffiliated users stranded. The $2k-8k/mo revenue band is honest for a freemium app with hyperlocal reach, though it implies the business stays small unless a B2B angle emerges selling aggregated outage data to insurers or municipalities. The biggest risk is cold-start density: a crowdsourced network is useless in any given city until it hits critical mass, and outages are infrequent enough that user retention between events is nearly impossible to sustain organically.