About
You're hiring one person, and this is him.
John Rossello runs Tillr Systems from Jacksonville, Florida. Four years building production software: marketplaces moving real money, native mobile apps, and operations rescues untangling years of legacy automation.
On the call you are talking to the person who will design the system and write the code. There is no team behind the curtain and nothing gets handed to a subcontractor after the contract is signed.
How the work runs
- One project at a time gets the attention
- Being one person is a real constraint on how many projects run at once, and it is the reason the person on your first call can answer your technical question without checking. If capacity is the wrong trade for your timeline, that is worth knowing early.
- Scoped before it is quoted
- No price comes out of a form. How much scoping a project needs before it can be quoted honestly depends on the project, and you get told which kind yours is. Once the figure and the dates are agreed, they do not move.
- You own what gets built
- Code and data are yours on final payment, in your own accounts, with no per-seat pricing and no platform lock-in. The handover is built so another developer can pick the work up, because that is the test of whether it was done properly.
- Sometimes the answer is don't build
- Plenty of calls end with a recommendation to buy an existing product, which costs the project and saves you the money. If the way you work is ordinary for your industry, off-the-shelf is usually cheaper and faster, and you will hear that.
What that has produced
- Online education & technical trainingFive years of answers, finally searchable
- Home renovation & interior designFrom 90-minute estimates to 5 minutes
- Consumer shopping appA native app, built end to end by one person
- Home services marketplaceReal money movement, built and hardened
- Service marketplace operations147 tangled automations, untangled
Where people usually start
Different ways into the same system. Most projects begin with whichever of these is costing the most right now.
- Replacing spreadsheet quotingMove quoting and job tracking off spreadsheets and into one system that prices the way you price and shows where every job stands.
- Knowledge in one person's headGet years of answers out of one person's inbox and memory, into a searchable system that cites where each answer came from.
- Custom internal toolsAn internal tool built around how your team already works, instead of a platform you bend your process to fit and pay for per seat.
- Outgrowing off-the-shelfWhen to keep paying for Jobber, Salesforce or Airtable, and when the workarounds around them cost more than building the thing properly.
- JacksonvilleA Jacksonville-based studio building custom business software for small companies, working remotely with clients here and across the US.