This is Part 3 of What I Built Next, a series about the things I’ve been building, learning and experimenting with since leaving Oracle. The shorter versions of these stories are published on LinkedIn under [#WhatIBuiltNext].

So, naturally, I started a cleaning business.

Because apparently servers weren’t enough.

The idea was fairly simple. I already owned a pressure washer. I enjoy fixing things. I enjoy improving things. And I hate dirt. I also wanted to try building something completely outside my usual world of software and technology.

So I thought: why not? And GrimeCall was born.

Except, almost immediately, I realised I wasn’t just enjoying the idea of building a business. I had missed building brands.

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Before software, there was design

Software engineering has been the biggest part of my professional identity for quite a long time, but it wasn’t where I started. Design was.

Long before I was worrying about APIs, distributed systems and software architecture, I was designing websites, identities, print materials and digital experiences.

Over the years, software gradually became the dominant part of my career.

I never stopped caring about design, of course. Good software requires good design thinking. But there’s something different about starting with absolutely nothing and asking:

What should this thing be?

GrimeCall gave me that opportunity again. Suddenly, it all came flooding back.

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First, it needed a name

I didn’t want another generic local cleaning company called something like:

Dublin Exterior Cleaning Services.

Perfectly descriptive. Perfectly forgettable. I wanted something that could have a personality. Eventually I landed on GrimeCall. It’s a deliberately ridiculous play on CrimeCall, the long-running Irish television programme about fighting crime.

Except instead of fighting crime… We’re fighting grime. Yes, it’s a terrible pun. That’s precisely why I liked it.

It immediately gave the business a personality and, more importantly, gave me something I could build around.

Once the name existed, the rest of the brand started taking shape.

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A logo isn’t a brand

Then came the obvious design work:

• the logo
• colours
• typography
• visual language
• website
• imagery
• tone of voice

But those are only the visible parts.

One of the things GrimeCall reminded me is that a brand isn’t a logo.

A brand is the collection of tiny decisions that eventually makes a business feel like one coherent thing.

How does someone discover the company?

What do they see first?

How do we describe the services?

How easy is it to request a quote?

What happens after they make contact?

What does the person arriving at their house look like?

What equipment do they bring?

How do we communicate?

What happens if something goes wrong?

What does the customer remember afterwards?

Those questions are design questions too.

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Designing the experience

This was probably the part I enjoyed most. I wasn’t designing a logo for a cleaning company. I was designing how the company should feel.

Friendly, local and approachable, but still professional. Memorable without becoming silly. Simple enough that someone can immediately understand what we do. And with enough personality that it doesn’t look like every other service business website.

One of my favourite details is on the GrimeCall website. In the hero section, there’s a file with a coffee-ring stain on it. The pressure washer cleans the coffee ring away. It’s completely unnecessary. I love it.

Those tiny details are the difference between creating something functional and creating something that feels like it belongs to a particular brand.

You can see it at: https://www.grimecall.com

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Then I started thinking like a software engineer

This is where my different worlds started colliding.

Once I’d thought about the visual identity and customer experience, my engineering brain started asking what happens if this actually works.

How should jobs be organised?

How should quotes work?

What information should be collected from customers?

Could parts of the process be automated?

How should equipment be tracked?

What checklists should exist?

What happens when another person joins the business?

How do you make sure a customer receives the same standard of service regardless of who performs the job?

Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about cleaning driveways.

I was thinking about systems.

That’s when I realised that my apparently unrelated experience in design, software, business and management wasn’t unrelated at all.

They were simply different tools for solving different parts of the same problem.

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Reality gets a vote

And then reality intervened.

Ireland experienced drought conditions, followed by water restrictions.

Not ideal timing for a business whose principal piece of equipment shoots water at things.

I could have looked at all the work I’d already done — the brand, website, planning, equipment and processes — and considered it wasted.

I don’t.

Because building something doesn’t guarantee that the environment will cooperate with your plan.

Products encounter markets.

Software encounters users.

Businesses encounter regulations, competitors, economics and, apparently, the weather.

Reality gets a vote.

So the plan changed.

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Changing the plan isn’t failure

This may be one of the more useful lessons I’ve taken from the whole experiment.

Building doesn’t mean stubbornly following your original plan.

Sometimes the assumptions that made perfect sense when you started simply aren’t true anymore.

You can ignore that and continue because you’ve already invested time and money.

Or you can recognise that something has changed and adapt.

The interesting question becomes:

What parts of what I’ve built are still valuable?

The equipment still exists.

The brand still exists.

The website still exists.

The processes and ideas still exist.

And the skills I refreshed while building all of it certainly still exist.

GrimeCall may evolve into something slightly different from what I originally imagined.

That’s fine.

It’s still being built.

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The thing I rediscovered

The biggest outcome from GrimeCall wasn’t actually anything to do with pressure washing.

It reminded me how much I enjoy starting with nothing but an idea.

Giving it a name.

Giving it an identity.

Thinking about the people who will use it.

Designing how it works.

Building the systems behind it.

Finding the problems.

Changing things.

Trying again.

For years, software engineering was the dominant way I did that.

GrimeCall reminded me that it isn’t the only way.

Software wasn’t the beginning of my career.

Design was.

It was rather nice to meet that part of myself again.

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The pattern continues

When I started this series, I described the pattern I seem to keep following:

See something that could be better → understand the problem → design a solution → learn whatever is missing → build it → iterate.

The homelab followed that pattern.

GrimeCall followed it too.

And, as it turns out, so did the next project.

Except this time there were no servers, containers or pressure washers involved.

There was a balcony.

And I had opinions about it.

Next: What I Built Next — Part 4: The Balcony.

[#WhatIBuiltNext]