Hi everyone. I hope you are doing very well. After a very long break, 3 years since the last edition, I’m back!
Why I was away for so long: I moved back to my hometown and had to focus on other things.
What I’ve been doing: learning as much as I can about AI agents, automation, and how AI is changing the way businesses operate.
Why I’m back: after spending years searching for “what to build next” and “what to do with AI,” I realised I had already started something I trully care about: this newsletter and the ecosystem around it.
Going forward, the plan for Good Business, Better World is to:
publish 2 in-depth editions per week
break down how impactful companies actually make money
build a searchable directory/database of high-impact companies
extract and organise impact data and reports
map emerging ecosystems and trends
help mission-driven companies deploy AI agents and automation
Now, onto the edition.
Brazil has a violence problem that existing institutions cannot solve.
37.5% of Brazilian women aged 16 and over experienced some form of violence in the past 12 months, the highest rate recorded since the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública began monitoring in 2017. That corresponds to an estimated 21.4 million women.
One case made it concrete.
Journalist Vanessa Ricarte was stabbed to death by her ex-fiancé. He had accumulated at least 11 domestic violence records since 2020, involving multiple ex-partners. She had no way of knowing.
The information was public record. But public records in Brazil are not actually accessible to the public in any practical sense.
They are accessible to:
corporations
employers running background checks
HR departments
financial institutions
Individual women had no way to run a check on a date, a driver, or anyone else in their lives.
Large information gap. Existing public data. No consumer distribution.
Founded in 2025 by Sabrine Matos in Brazil.
Sabrine spent her career in growth marketing. No coding background.
After learning about the Vanessa Ricarte case, she decided to build something. Using Lovable, an AI no-code development tool, she built the first version in 45 days.
The product:
women run criminal background checks directly from their phone
the app pulls from public criminal and legal records databases
results come back as color-coded risk scores: green, yellow, red
Revenue model: R$97 per year (around $19 USD).
Target market: every woman in Brazil.
The business is structured so that every paying subscriber directly funds the infrastructure that protects other women.
Criminal record data becomes accessible at consumer scale for the first time
Each check runs against the same public databases corporations pay thousands per year to access
The lower the barrier to run a check, the more often women actually do it before meeting someone
Areas of impact: women empowerment, safety, gender equality
SDGs: SDG 5 (Gender Equality), SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions)
1. The data already exists
Plinq did not build a new database.
Public criminal records in Brazil exist, maintained by the government. The problem was distribution: fragmented across court systems, hard to query at scale, and not built for consumer interfaces.
Plinq built the interface on top of existing public data. Infrastructure investment is one time. There is no data acquisition cost per user.
2. The unit economics are unusually strong
Annual subscription: R$97 (around $19 USD).
Low price point means:
very low churn friction
easy impulse purchase
word-of-mouth spreads without hesitation
3. Growth is structurally organic
300% month-over-month growth since launch.
Not from paid ads. From word-of-mouth among women who feel safer.
When a product solves a problem people are afraid to admit they have, but that everyone actually has, you get this kind of growth curve without a marketing budget.
4. The addressable market is enormous
Brazil has around 108 million women.
At 1% conversion to paying subscribers, that is 1 million users at R$97/year. That is a R$97M ARR business from 1% penetration in one country.
This is not a niche.
15,000+ users in under 2 months since launch (May 2025)
Subscription price: R$97/year (~$19 USD)
Funding: pre-seed round in progress; largely revenue-funded to date
Corporate background check companies already held the data. The government already maintained the records. Neither had any incentive to serve consumers.
Plinq did not build a database or solve a technical problem that required years of R&D. It built a consumer-facing interface on top of infrastructure that already existed. The unit of work was distribution, not invention.
That is a pattern worth recognising. Many institutional tools exist in forms that are technically public but practically inaccessible. Each one is a potential consumer product waiting for someone with a reason to build it.
Traditional background check companies serve:
HR departments
employers
landlords
financial institutions
Their products are designed for:
bulk queries
corporate contracts
annual enterprise pricing at a different price point entirely
Offering consumer pricing would cannibalise their enterprise pricing structure. They had every incentive to ignore the consumer market.
The government held the records but had no mandate to make them queryable.
What it took to see the opportunity was being a woman in Brazil, knowing the Vanessa Ricarte story, and being willing to ask: what would it take to make this available to anyone with a phone?
The answer was 45 days.
Public data that is “technically accessible” but practically inaccessible is a product waiting to be built
Consumer distribution of institutional tools is a repeating pattern: background checks, credit scores, property records, court filings
Low price point and high gross margin are not contradictions when marginal cost per unit is near zero
The best safety and social impact products don’t ask users to care about statistics — they solve an urgent personal question
Word-of-mouth is structurally built into products that solve problems people share privately with people they trust
Being personally affected by a problem is a competitive advantage: it creates urgency, product intuition, and founder credibility that no brief or pitch deck can replace
Thanks for reading Good Business, Better World! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Be My Eyes: consumer-facing tool that unlocked access to real-time visual assistance previously only available through expensive in-person services
Citizen: safety information made accessible to individuals through a subscription app; similar consumer safety model
Ada Health: democratized access to medical diagnostic information previously locked behind clinical appointments
Kiva: gave individual lenders access to microfinance tools previously only available to development banks and institutions
Clear: consumer access to identity verification and security clearance data, previously only available through institutional channels
Plinq was built by one person in 45 days, without writing a single line of code, using tools that did not exist 3 years ago. It reached $456K ARR in 3 months by solving a problem that governments had the data for and corporations had the tools for but nobody had the incentive to bring to the people who actually needed it.
The data existed. The infrastructure to query it was buildable. The market was enormous. What was missing was someone personally affected enough to actually connect those three things and charge $19 a year for it.
That is the pattern behind more impact businesses than people realise. Not a technology breakthrough. A distribution decision.
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