Lewis Bird

Co-founder & CTO

1. The Reality of the Environment We're Building For

• Construction sites are chaotic, messy, and unpredictable.
  • People are shouting. Things are delayed. Issues pop up constantly.
  • In the winter, it’s cold, wet, and often genuinely miserable.
• In that environment, the last thing anyone wants is:
  • A clunky app with poor UX.
  • Disjointed admin workflows that are slow, fragile, or overly manual.
  • Tools that require constant training or lack the right guardrails to prevent misuse.
• When we started Onetrace, the landscape was sparse. Most tools were:
  • Built using legacy tech, often slow and poorly designed.
  • Android-only, not cloud-based, or clearly not designed by product-led teams.
  • Many were internal tools spun out from construction companies, not ambitious software businesses with tech-first leadership.
• Today, there are more tools out there, and quality has improved, but it still feels like the category lacks a truly standout platform.
  • Compared to CRM, task management, or developer tools, there’s still a huge quality gap in software made for construction subcontractors.

2. How I Think About Building Product

• My background has always been in building tools for small and mid-sized businesses, focused on streamlining workflows and removing friction.
• I care deeply about building products that:
  • Are simple, intuitive, and easy to learn.
  • Feel fast, reliable, and enjoyable to use.
  • Make people want to use them.
• I’ve seen other tools fall into the trap of solving surface-level pain points, removing a bit of friction here and there, but stopping short of real transformation.
  • That’s why we should keep asking why and why again to uncover the real problem before jumping to a solution.
  • You need to get to the root issue to make something meaningful and not just ship something reactive.
• I’ve also never believed in making things complex just to feel “enterprise.”
  • Good software should be clear, fast, and memorable.
  • Especially in high-pressure environments like construction, that clarity is everything.

3. Experience Working With Subcontractors and Non-Technical Users

• I’ve worked closely with subcontractors across all kinds of trades.
• It’s clear that many are still stuck with fragmented, outdated workflows:
  • Spreadsheets, WhatsApp, Microsoft Word forms, random PDFs stored in shared drives.
  • Things are often repetitive, error-prone, and easy to get wrong.
  • And most importantly, people are used to it! They just expect their processes to be clunky and time consuming.