About UpdatesPad.
Built from the wrong side of a countertop install.
UpdatesPad started because I hired a fabricator, watched the work come out beautiful, and watched everything around the work be a scavenger hunt. So I built the tool I wished they'd had.
The story.
In 2024 I renovated my kitchen.
The fabricator did beautiful work. The countertops were exactly what we wanted. The slabs were right, the seams were placed where they should be, the edges were clean. By the end, you couldn't tell anything had gone sideways in the process.
But the journey to get there wasn't built for the customer.
Communication came through email, text, and phone. Sometimes from the shop, sometimes from the installer, sometimes from the office. Some of it came to me. Some of it came to my wife. A piece of information would arrive once, in one channel, to one of us — and then disappear when the other person needed it. We'd ask the shop a question they'd already answered, because the answer had gone to whoever happened to be holding their phone that afternoon. We'd find out about a scheduled template the day before, in a text neither of us remembered receiving.
The shop wasn't doing anything wrong. They were doing what every countertop shop does — running their business across email, text, phone, and whatever tools they had. The work was great. The journey just wasn't built for the customer.
That kept bothering me long after the countertops were installed.
Why I built UpdatesPad.
The longer I looked at the countertop industry, the more I saw the same thing: skilled shops doing excellent work, held back by the tools available to run the business around it.
Most of what shops use today is either a generic CRM that doesn't understand the trade, a specialty tool that handles one slice of the work, or a stack of spreadsheets, group chats, and email threads that nobody can search. Each piece works on its own. None of them work together. The shops know it. They've been telling vendors for years.
I came to this from outside the trade — as a customer of it, not a veteran of it. That meant I had to learn the work properly, which I did with guidance from people who've worked inside the industry. Their input shaped how the CRM behaves, how the job flow maps to what actually happens inside a shop, and where the customer experience needed to live in the product. That outside-in perspective is part of how UpdatesPad got designed: the customer experience matters as much as the shop's workflow, because both are part of the same job.
I built UpdatesPad to be the single tool a shop runs on — from the first lead to the final install. Priced by the job, not the user. With a built-in client view so the next customer doesn't go through what I went through.
Where things stand.
UpdatesPad is built. The product runs. It does what the rest of the site says it does.
The company is based in Virginia, run as a small operation by design. We aren't venture-funded, and we don't plan to be. That gives us the freedom to build for the shop, not for an investor's growth chart.
What's new is the customer base — UpdatesPad is in its early days, and the first shops on the platform are shaping what gets built next. If you're a countertop shop owner reading this, you're not too early. You're right on time.
What we're trying to do.
There are countertop shops in every state — small ones, mid-sized ones, family operations, shops with two crews running flat out — that are doing excellent work and could be doing more of it. The thing holding them back isn't talent, equipment, or demand. It's the tools they're running the business on.
UpdatesPad is built on the belief that every one of those shops deserves software that fits the trade — software that helps them grow instead of getting in their way.
That's what we're trying to do. One shop at a time.
Get Started
Ready to run the shop with one tool instead of seven?
Tell us a bit about your shop and we'll set up a walkthrough on your kind of jobs.
No sales sequence. No pressure.