Designer Pages

Sometime around the fall of 2008 I left Whitehaven to start my first company with my friend from high school, Jake Slevin. He was an architect at the time and was telling me that basically what he had been doing so far at his first job was specing products. Manually searching through manufacturer catalogs and finding products that were needed in the various projects of the firm and photocopying their spec page.

We decided to build a search engine and project management suite for specing products. We called it Designer Pages. We raised a small seed round from friends and family and started building. The company did pretty well, Jake still runs the company. I'm proud to say that every company I started is still in business and self-sustaining.

I learned so much about startups, collaboration, architecture and design, programming, and myself during this time. And it was at Designer Pages that I started programming in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, which has made a huge difference in my life.

There is so much more to say about Designer Pages but I'll leave it here for now.

Indexed over 1 million products for thousands of manufacturer websites and normalized product metadata to provide functional search across dozens of product attributes and facets. Created an algorithm to serve relevant advertisements within search results based on the results of the search rather than the keyword and filed an approved patent for the process. Grew the company to a team of 12 and over $1 million in revenue. Creat

• Built algorithm to predict the settlement value of personal injury lawsuits in Java integrating with Westlaw and Lexus Nexus for historical data.
• Created a workflow management application to intake the claims and verify the details of the lawsuit from attornies and medical records.
• Implemented a VoIP Call Center using the open source Astrik PBX that processed over 10,000 calls a day.
• Designed workflow management to process over 5,000 cases a day.
• Managed over $60 million in assets.