Most nights, after the last call is returned and the house goes quiet, I open a laptop and write code.
People in the trade think that's strange. People in tech think it's stranger that I spend my days in the trade. It makes sense from where I sit.
I've sat in almost every chair
I've worked nearly every seat in the impact window and door business. Sales, management, marketing, and setting up the systems everybody else runs on. Every one of those chairs has its own pile of paper, its own spreadsheet and its own way of losing a detail somewhere between the driveway and the factory order.
When you've sat in all of them, you see the same problem from five angles. It isn't that people are careless. It's that the job moves through too many hands, and every handoff is a chance for a size, a note or a margin to fall through the floor.
The software was built for somebody else
I've used the big platforms. I've set up CRMs, project tools and quoting systems for real crews. Some of them are good. Almost none of them were built for this trade.
They were built for roofers, or general contractors, or "home services," which usually means plumbers. They'll track a lead just fine. They fall apart the second you ask them about a mulled unit, a design pressure or a product approval. So the crew does what crews always do: they work around it. A spreadsheet here, a photo in a text thread there, a note on the back of a business card.
That workaround is where the money goes.
Why not just complain about it
I could. I did, for years. Then the tools changed.
A few years ago, building real software meant hiring a team or learning to code full time. Now a guy who knows the trade cold, and knows enough to tell good code from garbage, can build something that actually works. Not a toy. Something a crew could use on a Tuesday.
I'm not pretending AI writes it for me. It writes a lot of first drafts. I still have to know what the job needs, catch what it gets wrong, and test it like a customer's money depends on it. Because it does.
What I built
That's what Retrostack Software is: the company I started to make the tools I wished I'd had in every one of those chairs. There are three apps, and each one has its own site:
- Roughnote: captures every window and door opening at the house, with photos and flags, and works with no signal, so the office never has to call the rep back.
- Eyewall: draw the house, put every opening on its wall, and send the office a floor plan, takeoff and rep layout that agree with each other.
- Quote Converter Pro: turns a factory export into a branded customer proposal in about a minute, priced your way and inside the margin floors the owner sets.
They're in early access. If you want to see one, ask on its site and we'll walk a real job through it with you.
In the meantime I'll keep writing here about the trade, the tech and the stuff that breaks in between.
The day job pays the bills. The night job is the one I can't stop thinking about.