The room
Heartwood Logic sells custom software to small and mid-size businesses in the southeast. The pitch is not a platform. It is a system that fits how that shop already runs, including software that never has to leave their building.
I own sales, marketing, business strategy, and the full-stack product work across the company. My co-founder owns networking, sysadmin, and infrastructure deployment. That split is the company: I am in the conversation with the customer about what to build; he makes sure it stays up on their network.
First customer
TenGigAndBeyond needed two things vendors keep bundling and getting wrong.
First, a custom e-commerce site that catalogs what they sell without taking payment transactions. They did not need a checkout. They needed a storefront that matched how they actually close business.
Second, a lead generation and ranking service that runs entirely on local hardware. The ranking had to live next to their existing workflow, not in a SaaS they did not want to depend on. We built it, ran it ourselves, and then put it on their machines.
What we knew before the first sale
Before Heartwood ever sold the lead-ranking work, we used it internally. On average it cut the time we spent reviewing clients by 80%. That number is why we were willing to put it on a customer’s hardware: we had already felt the hours come back.
The customer deployment is recent. We will know more about how TenGigAndBeyond lives with it as they run it. I would rather say that than invent a second metric.
Why this is the work I want
This is forward deployed work in miniature. You are in the southeast, in someone else’s building, selling a thing that has to survive their network and their habits. You cannot hide behind a roadmap. The customer either uses it or they do not.
Stack stays specific to the engagement — custom web, on-prem ranking, customer hardware. Infrastructure owned by my co-founder.