Some lessons you learn
with a lawnmower.

I'm an independent developer based in Oklahoma. Before I built software for a living, I ran a small landscaping operation on the side. Mowing, edging, hauling mulch in the Oklahoma heat. Honest work. I was good at it and my clients knew it.

One of them had a large property, a nice house, and a standing weekly arrangement. Six weeks in, the invoices stopped getting paid. I sent polite reminders. He was always “going to take care of it.” Then he stopped answering altogether. Six weeks of work, $600, gone. I was twenty-eight and had no idea what my options even were. I just ate it and moved on.

That stuck with me. Not the $600, but the helplessness. The feeling of having done everything right and still having no real recourse because I had no system, no paper trail, and no idea what to say next.

Years later I became a developer. In 2026, my wife and I had our first child, and I found myself thinking about money differently — about what it means to actually get paid for the work you do, and what happens when someone decides not to. I thought back to that client with the nice house and the disconnected phone.

So I built Collect. A structured, four-stage escalation sequence that starts with a friendly nudge and ends with a formal demand letter and small claims prep kit. It runs automatically. It says the things you don't want to have to say, on a schedule, without you agonizing over the wording. Twenty-eight-year-old me would have paid anything for it.