Twenty years in trades before I wrote a line of code for one.

I ran a flooring business in the UK for most of two decades — measuring rooms, quoting jobs, chasing leads, all the ordinary friction of running a trade business — long before any of this had anything to do with software.

A corporate relocation took me to Bali selling restaurant equipment, and that's where the pattern became impossible not to see: business after business running on inefficient, informal systems, made worse wherever cheap labor means nobody is ever forced to fix it.

I'd started posting YouTube tutorials, and the leads that came out of them pointed straight back at flooring and interior design — the sector I actually knew. Building for trade businesses wasn't a strategic pivot; it was the obvious place to point twenty years of hands-on experience.

The first real build was Those Guys Painting Co — nearly two years in now. It started as a simple lead capture into an Airtable base and grew, iteration by iteration, into a full quote-to-invoice platform: speed-to-lead, remote quoting, a system that changed how the business actually runs. That work got noticed — Andrew referred me to Jeremy, who runs Legacy Millwork and Arch Shop in Grand Rapids, and the same pattern repeated there.

What crystallized it was realizing how many trade businesses are sitting on data silos — quotes in one place, jobs in another, pricing in someone's head or a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts — and that the back end of their own website is the obvious place to centralize all of it, if someone actually builds it that way. Once you see that pattern in one business, you see it everywhere the same size and shape.

This work moves fast. Building one part of a system usually reveals five or six more the business didn't know it needed — and watching an owner realize what's now possible for them, work that used to be out of reach, is the actual payoff.

I've run a trade business. I'm not guessing at what one needs.

— David Smith, founder