Why I build these

The job you never knew you lost.

Picture a good day on a job. You're packing up and the neighbor walks over, looks at the work, and asks the homeowner who did it. The homeowner remembers your first name and not much else.

Cartoon of a neighbor pointing at a sparkling clean driveway while the homeowner scratches her head and the worker who did the job drives away waving.

That neighbor was ready to pay you. Say it's a $600-a-month customer. They search what they can remember and land on a Facebook page with no number on it. Or they find the number, call once while you're on a ladder, and get your voicemail. So they call the next name. You never find out the job existed.

Cartoon of a worker balancing on a wobbling ladder with his hands full as his ringing phone flies out of his pocket, while the neighbor below cries into his own phone and a seagull watches.

Your work did its part. It made the sale. What fell apart is everything that comes after someone decides they want you.

I know because I was that guy. I grew up in Freeport, Grand Bahama, and for about two and a half years I ran a painting business there on the side. I missed a lot of calls because I was up on a ladder, and I lost jobs over it. I'll never know how many.

One I do know about. It was a contract job for a school, around $8,000. We were doing well, and that one would have been the icing on the cake. We felt it when it got away.

When I moved to America, I planned to change careers. I'd always been good with computers, so I started building little websites for people. The first real one was for someone starting a business who needed a way to take in clients. It worked, and they paid me. Next came a restaurant. Then a friend who sold meals a few times a week and needed an easy way to take orders from people who knew them and people who didn't, so we made a private app they could send out as a link.

I won a scholarship to a coding bootcamp at a tech meetup and graduated from Ironhack in Miami. I still like the same part best, which is helping somebody's business work a little better.

Every local business has a stuck spot. It sits between "who did that?" and "you're hired." Nobody can hire you if they can't find you, can't tell you're the real thing, or get your voicemail when your hands are full.

Cartoon of a customer clutching cash, wedged in the neck of a giant glass bottle while the worker pulls on his arm and more customers wait inside checking their watches.

That's why the plan comes with text-back and follow-up. A website by itself just sits there. I build the whole path from the first look to the booked job, the one I needed back on that ladder.

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