MY LAURA started because I paid for a year of software that was supposed to solve this — and it didn't.
We started on Joist, which did estimates and invoices and nothing else. When we needed scheduling we moved to Jobber. Jobber stopped fitting, so we went to Houzz Pro.
Houzz Pro's change orders were complicated. The reports came out wrong. The schedule wouldn't sync to our iPhone calendars. Onboarding was three separate 45-minute sessions, and they were free, but waiting for the next one was slower than just figuring it out — so I spent most of my time googling how to do things in software I was paying for. Eventually I added another application on top of it to cover what was missing.
For six months I bandaided software together. When we finally left, I asked Houzz Pro for our line items — three hundred of them, built up over five years and carried by hand into every system we'd used — and they told me it wasn't possible to export. I re-entered all of it manually.
Somewhere in those six months, other contractors started telling us they had exactly the same problem. What they needed, they said, was someone like me to bandaid their business.
That's when I stopped looking for the right tool and started building one.
Alpha Remodelers opened in Chandler, Arizona in 2021 — a veteran-owned kitchen and bath company. Travis served in the Army before Alpha and runs the jobs now — on every site every day, inspecting every inch of every project. He's a hands-on guy, not a techy guy — which is why the software I eventually built had to be something he could pick up and use without training.
I run the backend: operations, bookkeeping, estimates, scheduling, trade coordination, QuickBooks. I can also design and measure a kitchen and step onto the job myself when that's what it takes.
Alpha runs residential remodeling in the Phoenix East Valley — Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale. The bread and butter is kitchens and bathrooms, but we also take on whole-home refreshes, additions, and the occasional full gut-to-studs renovation when the project fits. Projects typically run $25k–$150k with timelines of 4–12 weeks, with 6–10 trade partners on any given job — demolition, plumbing, electrical, drywall, cabinetry, countertops, tile, flooring, finish carpentry, paint.
For a while it was a joke. Travis would tell contractors we ran into that his wife did the ops. They'd nod and say some version of "I need my own Laura." At first it was a joke. Then it was a plan.
I'd written software on the side for years — enough technical background to build prototypes, and enough operational knowledge to know exactly what was missing in every competitor's product. I started prototyping what would become MY LAURA in early 2025, using Alpha's real operations as the test bed. Every feature had to pass one test: would this save Laura or Travis time, and will Travis be able to use it without training?
By the end of 2025, MY LAURA was running Alpha's day-to-day operations. In 2026, we opened it to other contractors.
Alpha isn't a prototype account or a pilot customer. Alpha is the working company where MY LAURA was invented, and it's still the primary customer. Every feature in MY LAURA was built because I needed it at Alpha. Every bug in MY LAURA gets found by Alpha before it reaches you. Every roadmap decision goes through the question "would this save Laura time at Alpha?"
When other software companies talk about "customer-informed product development," they mean user interviews and survey results. When we talk about it, we mean Alpha is running a real kitchen gut-job in Chandler right now, using the software, and if something breaks, Travis texts me and it gets fixed by Friday.
Flat $299/month. No tiers. No upsells. No sales calls. Everything included on day one. Alpha Remodelers is still a customer. Travis is still the QA team — when a feature breaks his workflow, we know within hours because he texts me and it gets fixed by end of day.
When we left our last platform, two things happened. Our item catalogue — five years of descriptions, costs, and margins — I was told couldn't be exported, so I retyped all three hundred entries by hand. Our signed estimates I did get, but only because it occurred to me to download them one at a time before we closed the account.
Until that week, I'd never once thought about where any of it actually lived. I hadn't planned on switching software, so why would I have? That's the part that stuck with me. Nobody thinks about it until they're leaving, and by then it's a bad week.
MY LAURA doesn't ask you to think about it. Connect Google Drive and your signed estimates end up in your own Drive. Documents and photos you add to a project go there too. Your item library exports. Whatever happens later, what you put in is already yours and already somewhere you control.
I got lucky once. I didn't want anyone else to need luck.
A note for homeowners. If you're a homeowner in the Phoenix area looking for a kitchen or bath remodeler, Alpha keeps its own site separate from this one on purpose — Alpha is a real contracting business serving real Phoenix-area homes, not a marketing prop for the software. You can find Alpha through the usual channels.
Want to try MY LAURA? Start at the homepage or try the free 30-day trial. No credit card required. If Alpha trusts it to run real kitchen remodels, it's probably good enough for your shop too.