Five years of the same idea, and why we finally started building

Part 2 of 39 of Building TradeYoke, the story of how the platform was built, from January 2024 to today. Previous: Where TradeYoke began: an idea from helping run window cleaning rounds. Next: Why window cleaning rounds drift, and what a good one looks like. See every part on the build timeline.

Quick answer: We began building TradeYoke at the start of 2024, about five years after the idea first came up. We started because the problems on window cleaning rounds had not gone away, and because we had settled on a few rules: build for one trade properly first, put the work in the cleaner's hands on a phone, and never claim anything the product does not do.

• The idea was about five years old when building began at the start of 2024.
• We set three rules at the start: one trade properly first, the phone is the main tool, and no claims the product cannot back up.
• Customers and jobs came first, because everything else (money, quotes, routes) hangs off them.

The honest answer is that it is a big thing to take on. A tool that looks after customers, jobs, money and paperwork for a trade business has to be right, because a business depends on it every day. An idea is cheap. Being able to build it properly, and to keep it running for the people who rely on it, is not. So we kept the idea and watched the problems stay exactly where they were.

The question turned round. It was no longer "can we build it?" but "how much longer are we willing to watch people lose evenings to a notebook?" We decided to begin in January 2024. We did not have a perfect plan, and we did not need one. We needed a first target that was small enough to do well.

We set three rules at the start, and we have kept to them since.

• One trade, done properly, first. The first target was window cleaning, and within it only two things: customers and jobs. A small thing that is right beats a large thing that is nearly right.
• The phone is the main tool. A window cleaner is at a doorstep, not a desk. Whatever we built had to make sense on a phone, standing up, with wet hands.
• Say only what is true. If it is not built, we do not say it is. That rule is why you will see the word "pilot" on this site where something is still being tested.

It is tempting to start with the exciting parts. We did not. No invoices yet, no maps, no automation. The order mattered: a round without customers and jobs is nothing, and a job list nobody trusts is worse than none. So the first months of the build, which the next few articles describe, were about getting the round, the customer record and the job right.

Next in the series: why window cleaning rounds drift, and what a good one looks like. It goes back over the problems from the first article and turns them into a design brief.

Related: Where TradeYoke began · Jobs and the job wizard · Customers and CRM · Window cleaning software · Pricing · The build timeline