There’s no co-working space up here. No standing desk. No cold brew on tap.

There’s gravel, ballast trays, 400 solar modules, and a crew of ten waiting on my next call. I’m a commercial solar construction superintendent — and I’m building a software company from the jobsite.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Every morning on a commercial solar site starts the same way. Guys show up. They sign in on a crumpled sheet of paper. Someone asks what we’re doing today. I tell them. Then I spend the next 10 hours managing production, coordinating subs, tracking materials, running inspections — and trying to remember everything that happened so I can type it into a daily report at 7 PM when I’m already cooked.

The tools we’re supposed to use? They were built for people who sit at desks.

Procore is powerful, but it wasn’t designed for the guy standing on a roof in July with gloves on. The time tracking apps don’t understand cost codes. The daily report templates don’t match how we actually work. And none of it talks to each other without someone manually bridging the gaps.

So I started building the bridge myself.

What Is TradeStack

TradeStack is a field operations platform built for commercial solar — by someone who actually runs commercial solar jobs.

Here’s what it does:

• QR/NFC clock-in — Workers scan a code on their hardhat or badge. No paper. No buddy punching. Timestamped, GPS-tagged, done.
• Cost code allocation — Every hour gets tagged to the right cost code automatically. No end-of-week guessing.
• Daily board — A digital version of the morning huddle. Today’s scope, safety topic, crew assignments — all on one screen.
• AI-generated daily logs — I talk into my phone at the end of the day. TradeStack turns that voice note into a structured, client-ready daily report. Weather, manpower, production, issues, next-day plan — formatted and ready to send.
• ADP payroll export — Hours flow straight into payroll. No double entry.

It’s not another generic project management tool with a construction skin on it. It’s built from the field up.

Why I’m Building This

I’ve been in commercial solar for years. I’ve run crews, pulled wire, set racking, troubleshot optimizers, and walked every inspection. I know what the daily workflow actually looks like — not what a PM in an office thinks it looks like.

And I kept seeing the same friction:

The people doing the hardest work have the worst tools.

The front office gets Procore, Salesforce, PowerBI. The field gets a clipboard and a group text.

That gap costs real money. Missed hours. Wrong cost codes. Reports that don’t get filed. Safety documentation that’s incomplete. Change orders that slip through because nobody logged the conversation.

TradeStack closes that gap. Not by adding another layer of software on top — but by meeting field workers where they already are: on their phones, moving fast, wearing gloves.

Building From the Jobsite

I don’t have a team of developers. I don’t have funding. I have a DigitalOcean server, Claude Code on my phone, and the two hours between when my kid goes to sleep and when I need to be unconscious.

My dev environment is a cloud server I SSH into from my iPhone using Termius. I write code on the train, on lunch breaks, and at 10 PM. The AI does the heavy lifting on boilerplate. I do the thinking on architecture and field logic — because no AI has ever stood on a roof and wondered why the optimizer string doesn’t match the plan set.

Is it the “right” way to build a startup? Probably not. But I’m not optimizing for Silicon Valley approval. I’m optimizing for shipping something real that solves a problem I live every single day.

What’s Next

Right now, I’m the only user. TradeStack runs on my jobsite. I’m eating my own cooking — logging hours, generating reports, tracking production with the same tool I’m building.

The goal: get at least one paying customer before I take my next contract.

If you’re a superintendent, PM, or foreman running commercial solar jobs and you’re tired of duct-taping your field ops together with spreadsheets and group texts — I want to talk to you.

Not to sell you something. To learn what’s broken in your workflow. Because the best features in TradeStack didn’t come from a product roadmap. They came from standing on a roof and saying, “there has to be a better way.”

DaRoy is a commercial solar superintendent and the founder of TradeStack. He writes about field operations, construction technology, and building a business from the jobsite.