Why We Invested in FabWise
Small markets are now worth building for, and the people inside them know what to build.
Nick Ulicney bought Kutz Fabricating in Pittsburgh in 2023, and with it a punch clock. He replaced it three times: a backup punch clock, a $100 RFID clock, then the timekeeping add-on sold by his payroll provider. Each replacement fixed the clock and made payroll worse.
The last one recorded time against jobs. Nick pays people for the eight or ten hours they were in the building, not 4.5 hours on one job and 3.9 on another, so every pay period he folded the job time back into shifts by hand. The folding stripped the job data out of the system, and he could not get it back. Getting payroll right destroyed the one thing he had bought the software for, which was knowing what a job actually cost. An admin spent about a quarter of their week on it. He tells the whole story in the interview above.
When anybody can afford the build, invest in the problem’s owner
Every tool Nick looked at was built for a different shape of work: an electrician who drives to a site, bills four and a half hours, and drives to the next one. A ten-person custom shop was never a market worth a software company’s engineering. The build cost more than one shop can pay, and there were not enough shops alike enough to spread it across.
The thesis behind Pure Inference Ventures is that the cost of building software has collapsed, and the markets it opens are the small, specific ones that generalized software never served. The studio invests time, expertise and research in projects, and that collapse changes what the time should be spent looking for. When anybody can afford the build, what stays scarce is the person who owns the problem and a place to run the software every day.
FabWise had both. Nick spent his first career in project management counting labor hours, then bought a shop and replaced its clock three times. That is the domain knowledge that does not compress. And Kutz is a working floor where every version runs first and every pay period judges it. The build itself was one person’s to carry: twenty years of enterprise software, and one person directing agents. Since its first commit in May 2025, FabWise has taken 6,570 commits and 322 recorded architecture decisions.
When we choose what to build next, for ourselves or with a client, those are the two things we look for first.
Record time in the shape the money moves
A shop’s money moves two ways. Wages are paid by the shift, and work is priced by the job. Nick’s payroll tool stored time by job, so paying people meant reshaping the record, and reshaping it destroyed it.
FabWise stores the shift and puts the job underneath it. People clock in at the door, then tap the job they are on at the tablet. Payroll reads the shift exactly as it was captured, and job cost reads the job time recorded inside it, so nobody rebuilds one from the other.
The lesson reaches well past time clocks. Wherever one record feeds two decisions (hours for pay and for job cost, orders for revenue and for inventory), store it in the shape that has to be exactly right and derive the other. A tool built around the derived shape turns somebody into a full-time reconciler. Which number does somebody get paid on? That is the first question worth asking of any data model.
Let the floor take the rules out
We switched Kutz over in a day with a 30-minute tutorial. Within a month or two the special rules we had written were coming out, because they did not hold up in the hands of people with half an hour of training. The second version replaced our own rounding rules with the federal rule on rounding time-clock punches. The third went out in April, and Nick has eight employees on it, from people who grew up with a phone in their hand to people who would rather not use one, all putting in usable data.
Two lessons came out of that. The simple version is found by running each version where it is used, which is why building inside the shop is worth more than any amount of specifying outside it. And where an outside standard already exists, take it. A rule a regulator publishes is already defended and can be looked up by anybody who questions it; a rule you invent is yours to explain every time.
Capture the reason when it happens
Before FabWise, a question about a missing punch came up two weeks later, when neither Nick nor the employee remembered, and he settled it in the employee’s favor. Reconciling after the fact cost him time and money.
Now a worker leaving early for an emergency or an appointment records why on the tablet when it happens, and the note is there at payroll. The Foreman applies the same idea to the jobs: it reads the job data every morning and flags work heading over budget while there is still time to act. Nick’s example is a job budgeted at 20 hours sitting at 17.9, and over tomorrow if the work continues.
An exception is easiest to explain at the moment, by the person who caused it, and least costly to act on the day before it becomes a loss. Software that asks then saves the conversation nobody can have later.
What comes back
A product that runs a shop every day. FabWise is at fabwise.app, with a demonstration you can walk through on your own.
And the method. Find the person who owns the problem, run every version where it is used, model the record the money depends on, and ask for context when it exists. That is how we build for clients.
If you know an industry the way Nick knows a fab shop, and the software it runs on was built for somebody else, tell us what you’re working on.
Transcript
Nick: All right. Hi, I'm Nick. This is my shop, Kutz Fabricating. This is the result of 20 years of specializing in welding as an engineer.
Tim: I'm Tim Roman. I am a software engineer and long-time friend of Nick's and I'm the chief technical officer of FabWise.
Nick: All right. You want to ask me the like the why or something like that?
Tim: All right, so we're going to take some time to go over some details about what FabWise is, how we came up with the idea of the business, and how Nick runs FabWise in his shop to make it better, faster, smarter, and help him grow the business. So, today we're going to just get started off like obviously we know the details of our story. We know how far back it goes, what our careers and everything looked like there, but like how did we get started with FabWise? How did we go from friends that had completely different career paths to, you know, at this stage of life both having experience and converging that around a business we could build together.
Nick: Yeah, I guess the big why for me was I spent my previous career basically in project management. So, I've been counting labor hours since I started my professional career. And, you know, like labor and material, knowing what you're making is huge. So, I bought this shop in 2023. You know, it was an established shop. It's been around since 1937. I was excited. I wanted to get it running. I wanted to do better than anybody who's ever run it before. But, the big question was is like how the heck do I know how I'm doing if I don't have real cost data for my jobs? And I kept looking at it and looking at it. I'm like, I really need something. I, you know, I spent my career where I've been in multi-million dollar companies and they used Excel sheets to track labor time. You know, I've watched people spend, you know, millions of dollars buying software to track labor time. It's like I never really saw something that I ever felt was fit for any of the industries I was in. I'm like something clean enough where you track by a job code and you could see actually what you spent on the job. It's like that was big to me and I was like I need to get this in my business somehow. I need to have better visibility so I can make decisions as a small business owner as to what was really going on in my shop. And I think that was a really big turning point for me.
Because I started looking for solutions, okay? When I came in here, there was the old school time clock, you know, you put the card in, it punches the time based off of an analog clock. And I used that for the first 6 months. But in that 6 months, I had ribbons wear out, the time would be off by half an hour, I'd be resetting it, it stopped working so I got a backup one, I was using that, and I was just constantly having a problem. It's like I came in here and I needed to make big decisions and work on big problems, but I was stuck trying to fix some time clock from the 1950s every day. And when I went to go do my payroll, I had a stack of pay cards with very faint timestamps and no idea what the guys were actually trying to do or if they made mistakes and they'd write little notes and I was just totally clueless. I was like this system is just it's not functional. Like it's not ever going to be better.
So I started going out and, you know, of course looking on forums, on Reddit, reading everything I can about how to do better time tracking or just a time clock in general. And at that same time, my old school clock, the second one bit the dust and I was like I need something fast. I bought a real cheap $100 one off Amazon that had the RFID keys. I got it set up in a day. I had everybody running. There was no issues. Everybody was punching in and out. It was working well. But then when payroll week came around, I'd basically have to go to the time clock with a flash drive, download a CSV or, you know, Excel file report that was all blotchy, then I'd go spend an hour or two editing the report, figuring out what the heck they were doing. I'd have weird punches where somebody grabbed the wrong card or put in the wrong number. And my payroll task was like 4 hours of a day of trying to put together this puzzle from just terrible data that was coming from a real low-end time clock.
And I'm still looking at it like this is not good. I was like, there's got to be something better out there. So, I restarted my search. I looked and I looked and I looked. And at the time I was using [my payroll provider]. Of course, you know, they want to sell me their product. They have the timekeeper software they do. So, I bought that. And originally bought it thinking I was going to get a kiosk, but they basically don't do that unless you spend so much. So, I got a tablet and then the tablet had to be so good so the cameras would work, so you could do the face ID. And I get all this set up. I get everybody set up on face ID. And basically my rollout was just terrifying. It's like the welders wear hats and glasses or safety glasses, face ID doesn't recognize it. The GPS lock for the shop coordinates would drift. So, like every couple weeks I'd have people's tablets that would lock out saying it left the premises so I'd have to go in and recalibrate it. And that was just to get started. So, maybe four or five weeks of just these little painful trials where I basically abandoned their facial ID technology. I went to straight PIN login so that everybody could work. I started to disable all the special GPS stuff that was supposed to be for security so that they could keep clocking in every day.
And at the same time I start realizing when I run my payroll all the time data came in, but it came in based on the jobs they were working on, which to me never felt right because I pay them for their 8 or 10 hours they work. I don't pay them for the 4.5 hours on one job and the 3.9 hours on another job. So what I would do is I'd have to take that data, go through it, consolidate it based on clock-in clock-outs, and get the total time that they were there for the day to pay them correctly. So I'm basically manipulating the data coming in because it wasn't useful. In the manipulation, I'm losing the ability to take that data and get any useful reports out because later I find out I'm stripping out the data from their system and when I did that, I couldn't recall it anymore. So I'm like this is a total bust. I'm down this path where I convinced my shop to use the software that I'm not getting any benefit from directly and I'm creating a whole other problem for me that I don't really want to deal with.
So at that time I had an admin whose part of their responsibility was to help dissect the payroll data, to clarify that, make sure the clock-in clock-outs, the vacation, the holiday time, everything was getting paid correctly. And that was like 25% of their week was doing that. And I'm like this is just such a wasteful activity. And I'm constantly having to chase down my employees and ask them, you know, did you mean to. And we're having conversations 2 weeks after it happened and they don't remember, I don't remember. So to be courteous to them because it's really my problem, I default in their benefit. So I'm paying out probably days that they weren't there, but I just paid them out just to be fair. And this whole time I'm mad about it, but I got a company to run. So I'm kind of letting it just sit in the background, but I know there's got to be something better.
You know, and then I get to the point where my friend Tim and I are just talking one day and he throws out that he's looking for a challenge or something to do because he just needs something to go after. And I'm like, well if you really want something to do, because he's, you know, been in the software industry his whole career. I'm like, I want the software for a time clock. I want it simple. I want it to be made for what I do, for these small shops that are just trying to limit how many hours you put in every week to managing payroll, managing employees, and tracking time. I was like, and I want to be able to charge the jobs where the job data is kind of a bonus. I'm like, it's there for payroll, but the job data helps me make better decisions. And you know, throwing that into his court, I didn't know what he's going to do. I kind of thought like, oh, that's too much work. I can't do that. But, you know, he responded completely differently. And you know, that's really what led us to be where we are today. So, Tim, you know, you came up with the initial solution and you saw what we could do. And what we built today, which is just to me monumental for a small business owner that's trying to manage, you know, 10 people in a small shop while growing at the same time.
Tim: Yeah. I empathized a lot with your challenges that, you know, I was just hearing about after you bought the shop. I remember coming here for the first time maybe like a year after you bought the shop, before we started working together or anything. I just wanted to check it out. I was really happy for you and excited for you as a friend that you took the leap to leave kind of the corporate environment and get your hands dirty and start on something like this. But I was seeing some of these struggles too. I was like, you're a mechanical engineer, you're super smart, and here you are dealing with all these technology issues and just things that are taking away from growing the business. So that was my draw to it as a friend, and with a different set of expertise, was like, well, how can I help my friend with this? The world is changing right now. There's a lot going on in the manufacturing space. There's a lot changing with the way that we're building things in the United States and I want to be a part of that. And I want to be able to think about, you know, how do we make things more efficient, how do we make things easier to do so that we can tackle harder and bigger problems, and I want to empower somebody like Nick to be able to do the next biggest thing instead of spending their time fiddling around with, you know, a few hours on a spreadsheet here and there.
So, that was kind of the way that I jumped into this. We took a look at the different solutions that Nick was using. Obviously, I was a little bit familiar with some of the things, but I hadn't worked in this type of environment before. My background was more on the corporate, the enterprise side of software, where everybody has a mobile device, everybody has a tablet, everybody has a computer, and they probably have all three of those devices, and it was a totally different experience. We all have technology that we use at the corporate level and we have technology that we use at the personal level, and it's a completely separate type of experience. And one of the things that I've dug deep into over the last few years was the technology we all use in our personal lives is becoming so much better than what we use in our professional lives, because it can't keep up. You know, we hear about technology being addictive or children being able to use it. There are all these problems with it, but to me at the end of the day, that just shows how fast the rate of change is happening and how easy that technology is to use.
So, when we come into a workshop atmosphere like this, where everybody knows their gear inside and out, they know exactly how the welding machine works and how the grinder works and how the 50-ton press works, right? But they also know how TikTok works. They also know how Instagram and Facebook work. They also know how all the games work. They know inside and out how their iPhone and their Android devices work as well. So to say that an environment that typically doesn't have technology running in it can't run technology is wrong right out of the gate, right? We know everybody is capable of doing that, but we have to provide them the right applications to use in the right way in the course of performing their labor and their actions throughout the day, so it doesn't interfere with the work they're doing.
So that was kind of the approach that we took when we looked at FabWise, saying we wanted to create something that first off met the needs here. We knew there were a lot of other solutions in the marketplace, and that we could build something that was a lot easier to use. We wanted something that was really bespoke for this environment and this atmosphere, right? We knew what constraints we were working with. And then we wanted something that was dead simple to use, right? When we think about modern software, a lot of these consumer applications on our devices now are so easy any child can pick it up and use it. You can give it to your grandparents, right? And they know how to use it. So we have this really wide age and experience range, and we want the technology to be so good that anybody can pick it up and use it. And that doesn't mean that it has to be really complex or anything. That was really the first thing that we leaned on right there: the simplicity in the application. And we certainly came up with a lot of really complex ideas, you know, managing state-level controls around time cards and all the different ways that we could track the data, but what we kept coming back to, as we were jumping back and forth in it and testing it out with the rest of the team, was the simpler the better. And it actually takes a lot of work to get to that simplified version. We have to really just run through it first.
Nick: Yeah. You know, when I was researching the market, the big point for solutions was everything was the same. It's like there's 10 different companies saying we've got a time tracking solution for your payroll. Every one of those, it was a copy-paste, copy-paste. Nothing was unique. And they all did the same thing. And I personally felt like when I reviewed them, these aren't for my shop. These are for like the electrician that goes to the job and he charges an hourly rate for 4 and 1/2 hours and he drives to the next job. It wasn't meant for somebody coming to the same spot every day, clocking in, and doing four or five different jobs that day, or maybe one. They didn't have that flexibility. They didn't present the data in a way that I could use it easily. Everything had to be forced out of it and milked out to even get any value.
So, the big what-if for us was, okay, everybody can use a phone. They can go on TikTok. They can go on Instagram. Let's take that concept and let's give them the ability to do all this. I wanted the basic concept of: I have my time clock at the door. Employee comes in, I'm here on time, I'm leaving on time. That's how I pay you. That's the big picture. Nice, simple payroll for in and outs. And then after that, when you're in your shop, I really like to know what you're working on those days. So the big part was I bought tablets for everybody. So everybody got a $100 tablet and one of the rugged, destruction-proof cases. And I was like, that's the technology. It was like 100 bucks per employee and now I have the ability to get everybody in the shop to clock into their times. And it's not any harder than going on Instagram.
And that's where Tim really came through with the technology, and he built this amazing cloud-based, web-based program that installs perfectly onto any device. It's flawless. You don't have to have credentials besides your login. You don't have to have an IT department. You basically could take yourself as the owner. You have admin rights. You say this is my new employee. This is his username. And you get his tablet set up with a QR code and you hand them the tablet, and with a minute or two showing them how to use it, he can walk out and he's charging to your job. So that was the dream. We knew the technology existed. The big challenge was, well, Tim's got to make this software that we can use, and we've got to make the software at a price point that's not astronomical for a small business to take on. It's got to be somewhere between like 50 and 200 bucks a month, a range where it's reasonable, that you get benefit and you get the return on the investment almost immediately from it. So that's what we wanted. We wanted a balanced shop where the owner didn't have to worry about payroll, and that is clear, and I also had data for my jobs. So I could look at my job: X amount of hours plus my shop rate, X amount of money spent on the job, is it under or over budget? It's that simple.
So, Tim, through a lot of hard work, made our first version that we launched. So we launched this in my shop full out. I basically dropped the old system the same day. We switched all the tablets over to the FabWise software and we did a 30-minute tutorial for everybody in the shop and we sent them out here and we started actually using the software in a shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with real employees that had only 30 minutes of training. And immediately we realized we were overcomplicating a lot of things. A lot of the things I wanted, all these special rules, they didn't work that well in the real world. So I think we ran a month or two and then we're like, okay, we got it. These things are way too complex. How do we make them simpler? And we spent a lot of time going back and forth. We started stripping out things that didn't make any sense. We started going to the basic guidelines the federal government gives about time rounding. Simplifying the whole thing, the whole platform.
And then we had our version two launch that I think went really well. The shop immediately liked it. All the charges were coming through perfectly fine. I was getting real labor data. It actually got to the point where the shop was using it faster than I could keep up with it myself, because I was still learning to enter the data, and it was really just a time issue for me. But the software was starting to work flawlessly and I was really looking at it like we're on to something. This is something that we can really market. Other people in my same spot need this solution. This is a big benefit for small businesses everywhere that work the way blue-collar industries work. You pay your employee for your 8 or 12 hour day, you get your labor data that's, you know, about 80-90% correct, and you see how you're doing.
And I think the third version that we pushed out in April was fantastic. It's to the point now that it's bulletproof. I've got eight employees using it. And I've got a whole bunch of different kinds of employees. A lot of older employees that don't like technology, super young employees that grew up with it. Every single one of them is able to use it. They're able to put in good data. And at the same time, I now have total visibility of what's going on in my shop with the mobile app. Now, Tim kind of just made the mobile app one day and said let's try this, and I think it's probably my favorite part right now, besides a few other features, because I wake up and on my way into the shop I can see that my first shift all showed up on time and I can see exactly what they're working on that day.
And then it also gives them the ability, if they're doing something different, like if they have to leave early for an emergency or a doctor's appointment, they can hit that button there. And that was a big thing for us, even though it sounds so simple to hear. How do you deal with these employees that have these circumstances where they have to leave? I don't want to follow up with them 4 days later and have that awkward conversation. And then Tim had the aha moment, he was like, "Why don't we let them tell us when they're doing it?" So with a very simple prompt, they can say that they're leaving early for an emergency or write a note about what's going on, and it records it exactly when it happens. So when I go do my payroll later that week or next week, that exact note's there, and I fully understand what their situation was, and I can be more empathetic to them, and if they talked to me, it reminds me what they said. It's just such a seamless execution path now. I don't know how I operated before having this software, because I was spending almost a whole day just trying to get things right to pay people a standard paycheck.
Tim: Yeah. You know, I don't have the same industry experience that you do, but when I came in and started embedding myself a little bit more with the business and hearing about the challenges that you had on a day-to-day basis, the mobile app to me was a no-brainer. And I remember you saying, "Oh, stop side-questing. Don't be working on this and that. Focus on the core mission here." And I was like, "No." Your guys show up to the shop really early sometimes, and you want to incentivize them to do that, right? Come in when you're ready to work, when your day starts, right?
Nick: Yeah.
Tim: And you need to be able to have that visibility into the shop floor from anywhere you are, right? So to me, that's a core feature of this: whether you are doing a delivery, whether you are meeting with a prospect or a customer across town, or whether you're in the shop here, you shouldn't lose control over what's going on. You shouldn't have people asking questions about what they should work on next just because you're not here, right? So the more that we can connect the shop floor to your pocket, and get real-time visibility into things, was a really key moment that started to unlock some other ideas too, because there's been a few other features we built since then. Once we hit the underpinnings of the shifts and the schedules and the tasks coming up, we were able to start leaning into getting estimates and invoices into FabWise as well, and then digging into the Foreman intelligence tool that we built too.
Nick: Yeah, I guess the turning point for me was we locked in the payroll, we locked in the labor charges, and I was like, they're bulletproof. They work every time, and they're as accurate as they can be. Once that was done, we really opened up, and we were like, well, what do we do better with all this data? I guess the biggest other thing that's helped me besides the mobile app was Tim came up with what he's named the Foreman, which is just that. And the best way I could describe it is it's essentially the way I would be thinking in 2 days if I had this information, but the program's telling me 2 days before. So I have this foresight now that I see these jobs trending in a bad direction, and it's nothing that I'm thinking of or doing. It's the program looking at it, and it says you had 20 hours for this job, you're at 17.9 hours on it, and tomorrow you're going to go over if he keeps working on it. Maybe you should look into it. It's like I basically have another inner dialogue helping me run the shop now, where I'm staying in front of problems, and I'm not having to remember every detail and chase down every job. It's highlighting things that it sees as a risky area for me, where I'm losing money or I'm behind schedule, or I could have a potential upset customer. That right there has, you know, doubled my effectiveness with zero effort from me. And it comes to your phone every morning pre-populated, so I can read it on my phone. I can see who's working when I come into the office. I know exactly what my main focus is to get things squared away for the day, and then I go about my normal business. I used to be struggling, doing 75 hours a week just to try to keep up with everything. Now I've got my 40 core hours where I'm doing deals, sales, training employees, estimating, improving things, and all this stuff's working in the background, making it easier for me to run this company and be profitable.
And the big thing about that is we made this beautiful piece of software that's so simple. It's hard to even describe it to somebody that's not in the industry. But we really want to find people that want to share it with us, that want to see it and use it in their shop. So the bigger thing that we're trying to do now is we've created the partner program, where we're looking for other shops in similar situations, where their owners are looking for solutions using technology to improve the way they do their business. We really want to bring them in as partners on this, and the big incentive is that we will give you full access to every feature in FabWise for free as long as you participate. And we just ask for you to help us make it better and give feedback on how you use it, because we don't want it just to be for my shop. We want it to be for everybody. And we built it that way, but we can't prove that out until we get people that really use it and try to break it like I did for a year.
Tim: So we've got a lot of ideas and different ways that we want to continue improving FabWise, and I think we're at the point now where we've conquered the base of the application, right? We've got the time, we've got the materials, we've got the labor, we've got the actuals and the estimates in here. We've built a number of other features in FabWise. A lot of small shops don't have their own website. Well, you can build your website inside of FabWise and you can have leads delivered directly to you inside of FabWise. We've built the ability for you to have job listings and take resumes in and have those feed into FabWise, right? So we're thinking about FabWise being this entire platform that you run your shop on, with these really bespoke, industry-specific tools built into it, so that it all just works the way you would expect it to, right? So we're in the process now of trying to figure out which of these tools we continue to invest in. We know that there's different directions we can take the application, but we also know that we're getting a ton of value out of it today. So for like-minded shops like yours that want to become partners and want to invest in the future of, the way that I envision it, manufacturing in America, where we have to get to this level of accuracy and efficiency in order to compete with overseas competitors, right? We've got to take control of the variables that we have access to in America, and that is excellence, that is innovation, that is accuracy, that is speed. And so those are kind of the core tenets of FabWise that we're building the solution around, and we're looking for other shops that want to continue to invest in those with us.
Nick: Yeah, the strength that it adds just to your basic company: the ability to see how you performed on jobs against your estimate. The ability to see how you did time-wise, the ability to see when your employees are showing up. If there's tendencies for bottlenecks, if you need to hire more welders because you have so many hours in welding and there's just way too many that you have planned, all that starts to become clear to you. And from my perspective as a business owner, you can't make good decisions, or the risky decisions that you do have to make to stay alive or grow, unless you have real data to base it off of. It's not just your gut. It's not that I think I could do it. You physically see that it took me 500 hours to do that job. If I need to take a hit, I can't go any lower than 500 hours to do it again. And if I do, I know the exact risk I'm taking with that gamble. And I gamble every day, basically, selling jobs as cheap as I can to beat out the competition. So I look at it as I have to do better than the competition. And with foolproof tracking data that I can use to make an educated decision, I've already beat them at that. And then the rate I can do it at is getting faster and faster, because FabWise is keeping me so far ahead of my workflow that I'm ahead of the game and I'm basically making decisions for tomorrow today. So I'm beating everybody out. It's just a win-win, I think. And it fills this industry void that I've seen my entire career.
Tim: All right. With that, I think we're about ready to wrap it up here. This is a great conversation. I think we got a lot out here today. We welcome everybody to take a look at FabWise. Our website is fabwise.app. Go ahead and scan the link below if you want to sign up for a free trial or a free demonstration. We've got a live demonstration that you can walk through on your own. We look forward to hearing from you.