About
Built on a real slab,
not a whiteboard.
ashiba started on the paying side of the table. Our founder built a $2M custom home in the Texas Hill Country the usual way — hired a GC, $125K in management fees, cost-plus, every invoice paid at actuals. What that money bought was frustration: broken communication, opaque pricing, surprises that were never surprises to anyone but him, and the standing suspicion that “it'll cost what it costs” was doing a lot of unpaid work in every conversation.So when phase two came — a backyard office on the same land — he did what a fed-up computer scientist working in AI does: skipped the GC and ran the job himself, from designing the building to pulling the permit to bidding every trade. And built this software on the jobsite while the building went up, one screen per headache. The estimating bands came from lumber quotes that wouldn't sit still; the procurement tracker from a window package nearly ordered too late; the client portal from remembering, precisely, what it feels like to be the person writing the checks in the dark.The rule hasn't changed: nothing ships until it's been used on a live job. ashiba is small, personal, and unashamedly opinionated about how a residential job should run — one shared checklist, honest bands, and a clean view for every person on the job.Why “ashiba”? 足場 (ashiba) is Japanese for scaffolding — the structure you put up first so everything else can be built safely, and the thing a good crew strikes without a trace when the work is done. That's the software's whole ambition: hold everything up, get out of the way.
— The ashiba crew, Austin, TX足場 — scaffolding
Building something this year?
We onboard a few builders at a time, personally.