Verified conference finder with MCP for founders

What to build

A curated conference and trade show database with verified dates, pricing, and industry/budget/location filters — built for founders and B2B sales teams — wrapped in an MCP server so AI agents (Claude, Cursor, custom GPTs) can query real event data without hallucinating stale details.

There is no reliable, AI-queryable source of conference and trade show data with verified dates and accurate pricing. Wrapping a well-maintained events database in an MCP server turns a basic directory into infrastructure for the emerging AI-agent ecosystem.

Demand

Founders and B2B sales teams attend events as a primary lead-gen channel and waste real time hunting across scattered, outdated aggregator sites. The rise of MCP as an agent-to-data standard makes right now the window to position a curated events database as a go-to tool for AI workflows.

• Hacker News – Show HN: Conference / expo / trade show finder plus MCP (conferencefindr.com)News

  Show HN submission for Conference Findr (https://www.conferencefindr.com) received 3 points and 0 comments on Hacker News, indicating early but real community acknowledgment of the gap in AI-queryable event data.

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystemResearch

  MCP is an emerging standard that lets AI agents query structured, verified data sources reliably. An events-focused MCP server has no obvious well-known incumbent, making the niche practically greenfield for agent integrations.

• B2B Sales and Event Marketing Industry ReportsResearch

  B2B sales teams and founders consistently cite industry conferences and trade shows as a top channel for lead generation, establishing clear commercial demand for accurate event discovery tooling.

Stack

• Next.js (frontend + API routes)
• Supabase (Postgres database for event records + auth)
• Firecrawl or Apify (automated scraping of event sites for date/price updates)
• MCP SDK (TypeScript) for the agent-queryable server endpoint
• OpenAI API (GPT-4o for data normalization and categorization of scraped events)
• Stripe (freemium subscription or one-time data export billing)

Solo + AI difficulty

Data ingestion and keeping event records fresh is the hardest part — scraping hundreds of event sites reliably is an ongoing ops problem, not a one-time build. The MCP wrapper and filtered search UI are straightforward with AI assistance. Realistic time-to-MVP with AI coding tools is 3–5 weeks; maintaining data quality beyond launch is the sustained cost.

Entry threshold

Core build is a structured database with a scraping or manual-curation pipeline, a search UI, and an MCP endpoint — all achievable solo in a couple of weeks with AI assistance. The main ongoing cost is data freshness, which requires either automated scraping or crowdsourced updates.

Window

3-6 months

Where to find first users

• Hacker News Show HN launch (the original post signals this audience cares)
• r/sales and r/b2bsales for reaching outbound sales teams who need event lists
• Indie Hackers and Buildspace communities for founder-audience traction
• Posting the MCP server to the official MCP server registry / Anthropic community forums to capture AI-agent builders

Competitors

• 10times
• Eventbrite
• Conference Finder (conferencefinder.com)

Counter-signals & risks

• Existing aggregators like Eventbrite, 10times, and conference listing sites already cover large portions of this market; differentiation requires sustained data curation investment that is expensive for a solo builder.

• Event data is inherently volatile — dates shift, events cancel, and pricing changes — making real-time accuracy operationally complex and costly to maintain at scale.

• Solo founders and small sales teams often have low willingness to pay for niche SaaS tools, which may make subscription monetization difficult without a clear, high-ROI hook beyond simple discovery.