About

For a couple of years I worked in the trades, in disaster recovery. On job sites I heard estimates said out loud, and I had to decide whether they were right. I didn’t write them. I judged them.

That is the thread through everything I’ve done: working where the real world has gaps, and getting the job done there anyway. The products on this site came from that work, not from software.

Where it comes from

Auctions. In 2003 I was at Right Media, one of the internet’s first ad exchanges, where ads were sold by auction at scale. In 2006 I moved to product marketing at Yahoo. I wrote the requirements engineers built from, and the work there includes a patent filing on auction eligibility. I count 50RH, sealed bidding for property repairs, as my third auction product.

Contracts, relationships, deadlines. In 2008 I went to work on real-estate software at IDX, and I ended up running the company. In 2017 I became a licensed Realtor. Real estate and property management run on signed paper and dates that don’t move. I managed the contracts and the people on every side. I also sit on the board of a trade association for property managers, the people 50RH is built for.

Who gets in. In 2022 I became the product manager for gated-community access control: a connected product that decides who gets into the places where people live.

Judging a number, and staying steady with people. In 2023 I went into the trades, for a couple of years: disaster recovery by day, computer-science study on the side. After a loss, at the hardest moment in someone’s life, every kind of personality shows up. My job was to keep them, the crews and the insurers moving.

Then I learned to build. I took computer-science courses at Oregon State University while I worked. Along the way, AI became a daily tool. Today I’m a product owner by day, and I build my own products with AI the rest of the time.

Put together: I’ve designed a marketplace, run a company, worked the field, and now I build the products myself.

Every role, with its dates, is on my résumé.

Where each product comes from

• The sealed bidding in 50RH comes from judging spoken estimates. Sealed bids give a property manager a price they can defend.
• Lantern comes from my own family: an aging parent, and finding out how hard the coordination is, even for someone technical and good at troubleshooting.
• DeHoardMe comes from seeing hoarding up close on restoration jobs. It’s a fun side project.

AI in the work

• In 50RH, AI drafts a repair job from a manager’s photos for the manager to edit; it’s live on the paid plan, and no one has subscribed yet.
• Lantern has no AI feature yet, by my rule to build nothing new until the family interviews happen.
• In DeHoardMe, an AI judge gives a keep-or-toss verdict on a photo, in a TestFlight beta.
• clio runs the AI jobs that check my products: each gets its context from one store, each run has a spending cap, and nothing a job proposes is used until I approve it.

In my day job I work two lanes, product prototyping and product marketing. Both lanes work on a CMS, an ads platform and a critical project that cannot be named. I prototype with AI-assisted delivery, from requirements to launch, with engineering reviewing every change.

That adds up to the way an AI consultant or a forward-deployed product person works: close to the people who need the product, from intake to release. I can work that way, and How I build walks that lifecycle.

The honest limits

• Live is not bought. 50RH has been live with billing since 7 Aug 2026, and no customer has subscribed yet. Lantern is a prototype that runs on demo data. DeHoardMe is in a TestFlight beta, where nobody pays.
• Built for, not validated with. No product here has changed because real customers used it.
• A few years with a product title. My product titles add up to a few years, and I don’t stretch them.
• One person’s system. The way I work with AI is mine. It hasn’t been run by a team.
• Numbers move. Every count on this site carries the day it was read.

What I hold to

Each of these came from a call in one of the products, and links to it.

• Shipped means live and checked.
• Never show a number that isn’t true.
• Propose, don’t auto-promote.
• Fail closed outside what you’ve verified.
• Build nothing new until the interviews happen.
• Paywall the aggregation, not the arithmetic.
• A private tier is not a secret one.
• Advise, never gate.
• Don’t pay to validate a guess.