Chad Fennell

I bought a new HVAC system a few years back. Got three quotes. Couldn’t make sense of them.

The jargon was…thick. SEER ratings. BTU calculations. Warranty exception clauses buried in paragraph seventeen. I wanted a tool that could translate this into human language and tell me what mattered.

So this summer, I built one.

BidKraken ingests vendor quotes and does what I wished someone had done for me: flags the issues, compares the pricing, translates the technical specs. Then I asked myself: what if you weren’t comparing three quotes, but three hundred? What if you managed 5,000 apartments?

Here’s what I love: finding the operational pain point, helping to identify solutions, and building the thing that makes it go away. Fast. The shorter the distance between “this is broken” and “here’s something that works,” the better.

This project made me think about something: incomplete documentation probably explodes communication overhead. My guess is office staff spend hours in back-and-forth with vendors chasing missing details — or worse, they give up and move forward blind, trading risk for time. Not great.

So, the next step in my demo app will be to build an organizational inbox to automatically route documents and reply to vendors for follow-up on incomplete information.

I build custom solutions for these kinds of problems. Sometimes it’s a prototype to prove what’s possible (I looove building prototypes). Sometimes it’s full implementation. Sometimes it’s joining a team that needs someone who can ship.

If you’re dealing with operational friction and think “there has to be a better way” — there probably is.