Context
PegEx built software for companies in environmental services markets: organizations that bid on, execute, and manage complex projects under regulatory and operational constraints. Our first product was a reverse auction platform that helped these companies bid on projects more efficiently. I helped take it from concept to market, and it addressed a real, visible friction point in how work got won.
The problem
As we spent more time with customers, a pattern kept showing up. Bidding mattered, but it wasn’t where teams spent most of their time or felt the most pain. The hard part came after a project was won: coordinating operations, staying compliant, and handling billing and follow-through across teams. Most of that ran on manual processes and disconnected tools, and nobody in the market was solving it well.
The tension
The auction was our core product, with real investment and momentum behind it. Building something new meant committing a small company’s limited time and resources to a second product while the first one still needed attention. It would have been easier to keep adding auction features.
My role
I worked closely with customers and internal teams to understand what happened once a project moved from sale to execution, and to figure out whether the gap we were seeing was real, widespread, and something we could credibly fill.
How I approached it
Rather than treating those conversations as feature requests for the auction, I treated them as evidence of a separate, unmet need. Mapping the full lifecycle of a project, from winning the work to completing it, reporting on it, and getting paid, made the gap clear: operational and regulatory compliance work had no good home.
That became the case for a second product, built around how environmental services teams actually worked day to day rather than around a single transaction.
Outcome
PegEx built a new platform for operational and regulatory compliance, bringing sales, operations, compliance reporting, and billing into one system. It became the core of the business and grew to serve thousands of customers through a network of more than 100 vendors.
What it reinforced
Sometimes the most valuable thing a first product does is show you the problem worth solving next. Strong solutions often come from stepping back and understanding the full context of the work, not just the part you set out to fix.