I'm building the company and writing down what it cost. The wrong turns included.

I'm Adi. I own and run AG Smart Garage, a garage-door company in Chicagoland. Trucks, technicians, a phone that rings, a payroll to make. That's the day job and it isn't a side thing — it's the whole thing.

I have four kids and a wife who would all like to see me occasionally, so everything on this site got built somewhere between nine at night and midnight, in the gaps. I mention that not as a badge — it's the reason so much of it is half-finished, and it's why I think somebody else in the same position could do a version of it too.

I'm not coming at it from zero. Before the trucks I spent years building data products — personalisation and predictive analytics — for one of the biggest retailers in the country, and I trained in applied math and physics. That's the background, and it's the last time I'll bring it up.

What matters more is that there's no engineer on our payroll, and there never has been. The analytics, the technician scorecards, the ads attribution, the content system, the email triage — I built those myself, working through whatever tool fit the job at the time: ChatGPT, Make, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Replit and a few others. All of it around a company that kept growing while I did it.

The company got too big to run out of my head and it's still nowhere near big enough to hire someone for each of these things. So I've been building the middle myself, and writing down how it goes — what the problem actually was, what I built, what it changed, and the part I got wrong. That last bit is the one I'd read first, and it's the part almost nobody publishes.

I'm not where I want to be on any of it. I'm just further along on the data than I used to be, and a fair amount of what I built I had to tear up and do again.

I'm not selling anything. If you're running something around this size, I'd genuinely like to hear what's working for you — I'm still figuring most of it out.