About SideWRK

I'm James Reed. I've been a Honda master technician for twenty-five years, and I'm the shop foreman where I work.

My day starts with about an hour in the truck and ends with about an hour back. In between it's a twelve-hour day. I came up flat rate, so you learn to grind out every hour you can get — I work through lunch most days and eat at my toolbox. As foreman I dispatch the work, help the other techs diagnose what's in front of them, and keep track of where everybody is and what they're each good at.

I built SideWRK because of the second job, not the first one.

Why the app makes you get it approved first

I work on friends' cars. It's usually cash, usually a favor, usually in the driveway. And I've watched guys in my own shop get jammed up over exactly that kind of work — somebody didn't write down an out mileage, somebody skipped a box on a form, somebody did the job and then the customer decided that wasn't what they'd agreed to. In California you can get fined or sued over paperwork. And when a customer simply doesn't pay you, there is usually not one thing you can do about it.

That's the whole reason SideWRK makes you get the estimate approved before the work happens. It isn't a feature I thought was clever. It's so that at the end of it everything is documented, nobody can invent a different story about what was agreed to, and it would hold up if it ever had to.

Why nineteen dollars

I live check to check. I budget so that gas money is never the thing that runs out, because if I can't get to work, I don't make the next check. A lot of people are living exactly like that, and it's the reason side work is worth doing at all.

That money is Christmas. It's the power bill. It's being able to hand your kid twenty bucks so they can go do the thing their friends are doing. I got into cars in the first place to build hot rods, and I raised my son in the garage and at car shows — his dream car is one of the old Corvette Stingrays, the ones with the crazy angles and the fender humps. My own Barracuda has been broken for a couple of years because we can't afford to fix it. Side money is what fixes things like that.

So SideWRK is nineteen dollars a month and every trade is already in it. Not as a discount — because the person I built it for is doing this after a full week, and the software shouldn't turn into one more bill they have to think about.

Where it actually is

It's early, and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. I'm one person. There's no support department behind me and no investors telling me what to build. I read everything anybody sends me, and most of what's in the app is there because somebody who does this work asked for it.