Business — Building the Company 1 post · more coming
Starting the Company — LLC, Structure, and Early Decisions
October 27, 2025: AfroTech. The PRD was started the next day. Why two founders — a 13-year trades practitioner now teaching CTE, and a systems engineer with lived experience of inclusive hiring — formed KinTech LLC in November, and the family promise that came first.
The Real Costs of Building a Platform
The four questions before buying any tool, the $30/month AI budget that became our highest-ROI line item, trading skills for skills when you can't pay cash, and the bounced-email lesson that nearly throttled our verification codes for hours.
Compliance and Legal — What Nobody Tells You
The question that turned compliance into a launch blocker: "where is the user's delete-my-account endpoint?" Plus the trademark pivot that renamed the platform to KinTrades a week before launch — and the privacy, consent, and classification work that determines whether you can legally operate.
Choosing What to Build First — Sequencing Under Constraint
Strategy when capacity (not capital) is the binding constraint — at ~22 hours a week of personal time outside a full-time tech job. The three filters for every decision, why pilot before pricing, and the discipline of saying "not yet" to good ideas.
Product — Solving the Problem 1 post · more coming
The Market Opportunity in Skilled Trades Hiring
The worker was my family. The employer was me. Why a 13-year trades practitioner (now CTE instructor) and a rental-property owner with lived experience of inclusive hiring built a purpose-built platform for skilled trades — and the October & November ideation work that came before any code was written.
What Users Taught Us
The hour with one contractor that rearranged our roadmap, three specific usability problems we'd never have caught from a desk, and why cutting features made the product better.
Building Value for Both Sides of the Market
What an employer's first five minutes on KinTrades looks like, why WOTC integration sells itself (up to $9,600 per eligible hire), and how community partnerships became our distribution strategy.
Technical — Engineering the Platform 1 post · more coming
Infrastructure Decisions That Let Us Move Fast
Environment strategy, identity, secrets, CI/CD, telemetry — the month nobody sees, and the foundation that made 300+ commits in January possible.
Engineering the Core — Matching, Search, and Scale
The matching engine, location-aware search, media handling, and the API migration that happened mid-month — plus the data-layer rebuilds (low-code → SQL → taxonomy revamp) that proved rebuilds aren't failures. Over 300 commits in 31 days.
Quality at Speed — Testing, Accessibility, and Mobile
33 accessibility issues closed, mobile-first rebuild across every page, and the race condition that taught us why timeout-based workarounds are tech debt with a delay timer.
Production Hardening — Security and Resilience
The security feature we deleted three weeks before launch, the verification timing that took multiple iterations, and the infrastructure-as-code hardening that ships across environments.
Operating a Live Platform
Launch-day morning, the single-pane dashboard, alerting as code — and the community UAT event where students chose two hours of mentorship over $50 (every single one) and gave us better testing than any automated suite could.
How a Small Team Ships Fast
A team of three — me, my husband Ed, and an intern — shipped 1,000+ commits across four months of nightly grind around a full-time tech job and a family. The discipline, AI leverage, and community fuel that made it possible — and the post-launch transition to a tighter ~22-hour-a-week cadence (still working toward sustainable).