SolveTO
Civic accountability for Toronto. 418,000 city assets mapped. AI turns a photo into a real 311 report in 10 seconds.
Live
solveto.ca ↗Ahmed Nadar
Product builder · Toronto
Toronto
I build Rails apps that solve a specific problem for a specific person. SolveTO is mapping Toronto's 418,000 civic assets and turning a phone photo into a real 311 report. STL Agent is helping GTA contractors stop losing $50,000+ a year to slow follow-up. Both Rails. Both running today.
Shipping SolveTO — a civic accountability platform for Toronto. 418,000 city assets mapped, 25 wards integrated, real residents using it, real councillors being measured. Five media interviews in the first week.
Launching STL Agent — a 60-second response system for GTA contractors. The contractor who picks up the phone first wins the job. STL makes sure that contractor is you. Booking 5 contractors for white-glove install this quarter.
Also maintaining RapidRails (the UI component library both products are built on).
What I do
Toronto's 311 system handles 600 service types and costs the city $11–$16 per call. Fewer than 20% of residents use the app. So I built SolveTO — snap a photo, AI writes the report, the city and your councillor get notified in 10 seconds. It is live, mapping every catch basin, hydrant, and traffic signal across the 25 wards.
The average GTA contractor takes 42 hours to reply to a quote request. The customer who responds first wins 78% of the time. So I built STL Agent — a Telegram-native lead system that pings the contractor in under 60 seconds and lets the AI start the conversation. So they stay on the roof, not at a laptop.
Same playbook each time: find the broken thing, talk to the person living with it, build the thing that actually fixes it. Rails + AI is just the toolbox.
How I work
SolveTO went from idea to 1,300+ indexed pages and 418,000 mapped assets in a few months — built ~90% with AI-assisted development on Rails 8. Not a prototype. A live app with real users, real councillors being scored, and real journalists writing about it.
What changed in the last two years is not what to build — it is how fast one person can build it. Understanding the problem is still the only hard part. Code is the easy part now. That is the real edge: the developer who actually talks to the user, then ships the fix the same week.
Work
Civic accountability for Toronto. 418,000 city assets mapped. AI turns a photo into a real 311 report in 10 seconds.
Live
solveto.ca ↗Speed-to-lead for Toronto contractors. Customers hear back in minutes while you stay on the job — not at a laptop.
stl.ahmednadar.com ↗Production ready UI component library for Rails developers and the Rails ecosystem.
rapidrails.cc ↗Accountability tool for builders. Track your progress publicly and stay honest about what you are shipping.
shipit.day ↗Describe your app, get a production Rails app in seconds. Not a prototype.
rapidfy.dev ↗The developer who talks to the user beats the team that doesn't. Simple solutions beat clever ones. Ship the version a real person can use today, not the version that wins the architecture review.
Writing
Toronto has been collecting infrastructure data for decades. Catch basins, hydrants, traffic signals, sewer networks. All public. All free. None of it was connected. Until now.
When someone reports a person sleeping rough on a sidewalk, they're asking for help, not publishing a mugshot. How SolveTO handles homelessness reports differently.
Contractors lose thousands every year because they can't respond fast enough. I built a system that fixes that.
Get in touch
If you are a Toronto contractor losing leads to slow follow-up, start with the free Speed-to-Lead Score — see what it is costing you in under a minute. If you are a city, agency, or SMB with a problem that needs a Rails-and-AI solution shipped fast, email me directly.
Currently booking 5 GTA contractors for STL Agent install · selectively taking on civic-tech and SMB builds