I want the first thing on this page to be honest, so here it is: I started building Nail & Tally because I was tired of not knowing where my tools were.

My job is to get the right tools, material, and equipment to the right job site. I pull it, load it, drive it out, drop it off. At the end of the day I collect whatever needs to come back, haul it to the shop or the yard, and put it away where I think it goes so it's ready next time.

The trouble is always in those four words: where I think it goes. I'd put something away, sure it was handled, and a week later it wasn't where I left it. Or it never made it back from the site at all. You don't find out in the moment. You find out on the morning someone's standing there needing the thing, and it's gone, and now the choice is drive around looking for it or just buy another one. I've done both more times than I'd like to admit.

I tried fixing it the normal ways. Barcodes and asset tags sound great until you're the one who's supposed to stop and scan every item while a truck's idling and a crew's waiting. Spreadsheets are honest for about an hour. None of it fit the way a job site actually moves: fast, messy, no spare hands.

So I started building what I actually wanted: something that lives on the phone that's already in my pocket. Something I can update in the few seconds between loading the truck and pulling out of the yard. No tags to print, no barcodes to scan, no separate device to lose. Just: here's what I have, here's where it is, here's where it's going.

That's the whole idea. Nail & Tally tracks every tool across every job site with nothing but your phone. Managers get the big-picture view on a desktop; the crew works off the phone in the field. (Pricing: coming soon.)

I'm building it in the open, here. I'll write up the real decisions, why we went one way instead of another, what we cut, where I was wrong, and keep a running list of everything we ship. Partly because I think that's the only honest way to earn a contractor's trust, and partly because I'd want to see it before I trusted somebody else's tool.

There's more coming that isn't done yet. The one I'm most excited about: using your phone's camera to help log a tool: point, and let the app do some of the work. That's on the roadmap, and when it's real I'll write about it here. Not before.

If you run a crew and you've lived this (tools wandering off, the end-of-day count nobody has time for), I'm building this for you, because I'm building it for me. More soon.

Thomas K.