Portfolio Prototype · Powered by Official Public Data
Find hospitality businesses while they are still taking shape.
Opening Soon Radar monitors official licensing activity, filters for meaningful restaurant and bar signals, and turns public records into a focused dashboard and weekly opportunity digest.
Licensing activity is an opening-related business signal. It does not confirm an opening date, an available sales opportunity, or that purchasing decisions remain unmade.
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hospitality licensing signals in the last 30 days
The framework
Watch → Filter → Deliver
01 · WATCH
Official records, on a schedule
Opening Soon Radar checks official City of Chicago licensing records for newly issued hospitality licenses and relocations. Each record carries its retrospective application-to-issuance timeline, published once the license is issued.
02 · FILTER
Renewals out, signals ranked
It removes renewals, irrelevant license categories, stale records, duplicates, and incomplete entries, then ranks the remaining signals using transparent rules.
03 · DELIVER
A dashboard and a digest
It presents a focused dashboard and prepares a weekly digest for local vendors who want to identify potential hospitality customers earlier.
Hospitality Launch Signal Monitor
Chicago signal dashboard
New signals in period
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Strong signals
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Issued in last 30 days
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Neighborhoods represented
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Last data sync
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Opening Signal Pipeline
Stages reflect what the official dataset publishes: licenses appear once issued, grouped here by how fresh the issuance is. Pending applications are not published by the city. Click a stage to filter.
New signals by week
signals / week
No activity in the selected window.
Signals by category
filtered set
No activity in the selected window.
How signal scoring works
Opening-stage relevance≤ 35
New license 30 (+5 if the license term starts within ±30 days) · relocation 18.
Recency≤ 30
≤7d 30 · ≤14d 25 · ≤30d 19 · ≤60d 12 · ≤90d 6 · older 2.
Hospitality category≤ 20
Core food/tavern/on-premises 20 · adjacent categories 14.
Data completeness≤ 15
Name 4 · address 3 · area 3 · dates 3 · status 2.
Scores rank official records for review. They are not lead-quality scores and do not predict that a business will open, when it will open, or that any sale is available.
No signals match these filters.
Licensing data couldn't be loaded right now. Try refreshing in a moment.
Licensing activity is an opening-related business signal. It does not confirm an opening date, an available sales opportunity, or that purchasing decisions remain unmade. Addresses shown are commercial premises from City of Chicago public records; renewals are excluded, and records appear in the public dataset only after a license is issued.
Case study
Why this exists
The problem
Vendors that sell to restaurants and bars often discover new businesses only after opening announcements, directory listings, or advertising appear. Official licensing records can reveal earlier commercial activity, but the records are noisy and difficult to monitor consistently.
The solution
Opening Soon Radar turns official licensing data into a filtered, ranked, vendor-friendly view of hospitality businesses showing recent opening-related activity.
The validation question
Are licensing records early and actionable enough for local hospitality vendors to justify paying for recurring access?
This is a working portfolio prototype built to explore that question — not a proven commercial product.
What this build demonstrates
- · Official government-data integration
- · Scheduled monitoring architecture
- · Server-side normalization
- · Renewal and duplicate filtering
- · Transparent signal scoring
- · Responsive dashboard design
- · Digest preparation
- · Graceful fallback handling
- · Responsible public-data presentation