Who you are hiring.

There is a working system. It holds the jobs, the customers, the insurance claims, the money, the crews and the schedule, the leads, the tasks and the reporting — and you go through the whole of it on the call, with real records in front of you.

You will be dealing with the person who writes the code. You describe the problem once, to the person who can fix it. It is the part that does not scale, and it is the part you are buying. A bigger vendor can outspend this on features. None of them can put you on the phone with the person who wrote the screen you are complaining about.

One summer in 2020 I worked for a roofing company, United Roofing Restoration, translating for the crews. It gave me a seat on both sides of it. The owner talked to me about his company at length and without much filter, and I spent the rest of the time around the people doing the work. Exposure, not experience, and I am not going to call it anything else. I studied Portuguese, which is where the name came from, and I speak Spanish, which is worth more on a roof than most of what I studied. I am based in Colorado.

02  /  Being early

What early actually means

It means you will get more attention than you would from an established vendor, and less proof. Both of those are real, and which one matters more depends on the company you run.

What it does not mean is that you are carrying the risk on your own. Your data is yours from the first day, exportable in a format you can use, including the day you decide to leave. If this does not work out, you leave with everything you put in.

And if the risk you are weighing is me — one person, one small company — the answer is in how the thing is built rather than in anything I could promise about myself. Your system runs on your domain, on infrastructure in your company’s name. If I stopped tomorrow it would keep running. What would stop is the changes, not the software. Every build is documented to the standard a developer who has never seen it would need, and that documentation ships with the system — you read it before you sign anything off, so it is a thing you can check rather than a promise you have to take. You keep the right to run your system for as long as you want it, whether or not Pontura is still here. If Pontura stops trading, the code itself comes to you. Both of those are clauses in the agreement, so you can read them before you sign.

The ordinary version of that question is what happens if something breaks rather than if I do. Your system is backed up automatically every day, and the backups are kept for seven days — so if anything has to be restored, the most you can lose is a day of entries. Your project does not sleep, throttle or pause when nobody is using it. And if something does go wrong, you will hear back from me within one business day — that is a promise about how fast I answer, which is the part I control.

— Bridger Grothe, founder, Pontura Systems