A few years ago I started a home services company in Oregon. Veteran-owned, family-run, working out of Salem and serving the Willamette Valley. On Top Home Services — OTHS to anyone who's worked with us. We clean roofs, pressure wash driveways and houses, hang Christmas lights, clear gutters, and take on the occasional remodel when it makes sense. It's the kind of business the American economy is supposed to support: a guy with a skill, a truck, and a willingness to work. Today that means providing good marketing effort, working through jobs with appropriate correspondence and systems, all to install a fence post and soft-wash a roof. A guy should be able to serve his community when putting in the work, not face financial, red-tape, and technical burdens that make it close to impossible.
What I learned running OTHS — across more than a hundred jobs and seven service lines last year — is that the modern small business doesn't actually have it easy. Not because the work is hard. The work is the good part. Cleaning a mossy roof and watching a homeowner's property look ten years younger is honest, satisfying labor. The hard part is the digital scaffolding around the work.
Last year I spent close to a fifth of my revenue on marketing platforms, fragmented across more than a dozen vendors, with no unified way to tell which leads actually became paying jobs. The single largest channel was a national lead-gen platform that charges per lead regardless of whether the job ever closes. My booking, quoting, payments, scheduling, reviews, and customer records lived in different systems that didn't talk to each other. I couldn't easily draw from data to pull insights — luckily, I had them in my head. But that won't be enough to grow with others or easily share knowledge.
By the time the average small operator has stitched together the eight or ten platforms it takes to run a serious business, they're paying rent on their own existence. And the moment any of those vendors changes pricing, gets acquired, or sunsets a feature you depend on, you find out who actually owns your business. It isn't you.
I started building SQUEIL because I got tired of that arrangement, and because I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
What SQUEIL Actually Is
SQUEIL is a sovereign Business Operating System and marketplace. The word sovereign is doing a lot of work in that sentence, so let me unpack it.
A tenant on SQUEIL owns their data, their contracts, and their customer relationships. Not in the fine-print "you own your data" sense that every SaaS contract claims and few honor — but in the architectural sense. The platform is built so that an operator can run their entire business on it without their book of business quietly becoming someone else's bargaining chip.
The marketplace side replaces the per-lead extraction model. Instead of paying for "leads" that may or may not even be real, providers pay a subscription and a commission on completed work. You only pay when value actually changes hands. That single shift, applied consistently, redirects thousands of dollars a year from extractive intermediaries back into the hands of the operators doing the work.
Underneath both is a unified data layer that does what the fragmented stack can't: per-job cost tracking, route optimization across geographic clusters, automated review collection, AI-assisted quoting using shared pricing intelligence, and integrated customer records. The kind of operational visibility that, today, is reserved for businesses big enough to hire an analyst.
Our economics are structured so that the largest share of revenue flows back to the operators and providers actually doing the work — not to platform overhead, not to intermediaries, not to absentee shareholders. That's an unusual arrangement in this industry, and it's deliberate. Platforms that extract maximum rent eventually train their users to resent them. We're trying to build something users would defend.
OTHS as the Proof of Concept
I didn't start with the platform. I started with the pressure washer.
OTHS is SQUEIL's Founding Proof-of-Concept Tenant. Every workflow SQUEIL supports has to first survive contact with a real Oregon home services company. We quote real fences. We schedule real crews. We invoice real customers. When a feature doesn't work, I find out the same way our future tenants will — by losing time on a Tuesday morning.
This matters more than it might sound. Most B2B software is built by people who have never run the kind of business their software claims to serve. The result is tools that look great in a demo and bleed you in production. Building SQUEIL on the back of an actual operating small business is a discipline. It keeps the roadmap honest. It also generates the kind of operational data — completed jobs, time entries, route patterns, pricing outcomes — that a platform needs to deliver intelligence to the next operator who joins.
Every operational improvement we make at OTHS — tighter job costing, smarter routing, better review velocity, leaner marketing spend — becomes a template for the providers who come after us. The proof point isn't a slide deck. It's a live business getting better in public.
Who's Building This
A platform inherits the character of the people who build it. SQUEIL is being built by enthusiastic believers — but believers with scars, taste, grit, and perseverance — all earned the hard way for a reason. The team has spent years inside the systems we're now trying to replace. We've watched good operators get squeezed by extractive intermediaries. We've used the tools that promised the world and shipped half of it. We've felt the friction in our own work, on our own balance sheets, in our own families.
That's why we have opinions about the architecture. It's why the marketplace economics are structured the way they are. It's why OTHS is the first tenant instead of a hypothetical user persona. We're not building this from a whiteboard. We're building it from the wounds — and from the discernment those wounds left behind about what's worth shipping and what isn't.
You don't have to take our word for any of that. You can read the architecture. You can talk to the operators we've already brought in. You can watch what we ship, sprint after sprint, where everyone can see. Trust in software gets built the same way trust gets built anywhere else: by saying what you'll do, then doing it, in front of witnesses.
DevForge: The People Side
Software alone isn't enough. A platform that lets small operators run sovereign businesses still depends on someone being able to implement it well. So we're building DevForge Academy — a training pipeline that takes people who want a real, marketable skill and turns them into qualified SQUEIL implementors who can earn a living through the marketplace.
This is the part of the project I'm proudest of, honestly. Dignity through competence is something I believe in deeply. The fastest way to help someone climb out of a tough spot isn't to hand them a benefit — it's to hand them a skill, a peer group, and a path to paying work. DevForge is meant to do exactly that, at scale, in service of the broader marketplace.
What I'm Not Claiming
I want to be careful here, because founders tend to overpromise and I've watched enough of them embarrass themselves.
SQUEIL is not going to fix the country. It's not going to repair the family, restore civic trust, or solve the deeper crises of meaning that a lot of people are quietly carrying. Software can't do those things. Any platform that claims it can is the kind of platform you should run from. The hard work of community, faith, family, and personal character belongs to people, not products.
What SQUEIL can do is remove some of the economic dependency that makes the rest of life harder than it needs to be. If a contractor in Salem can run his business without renting his existence from a stack of extractive vendors, he has more time, more margin, and more dignity to spend on the things that actually matter to him. That's the lane we're in. It's a narrow lane on purpose, and it's a real one.
Where We Are
We're in Sprint 3 of a 24-sprint build plan running through February 2027. OTHS is operating and feeding the platform real data. The architecture is in place. The agent orchestration layer is shipping. The first cohort of DevForge candidates is forming. We're starting conversations with the first non-OTHS tenants and selecting our early implementor partners with care.
There's a long road ahead, and we're walking it deliberately, sprint by sprint, with our convictions intact.
If you're an operator who's tired of paying rent on your own business, an implementor who wants to do real work for real money, or a stakeholder who believes small American businesses deserve infrastructure built for them rather than against them — I'd like to hear from you.
Build over beg. That's the whole pitch.
The Bigger Picture
Let me be specific about what "the things that actually matter" looks like to me. A founder's note about software is a strange place to talk about this, but the conviction is the engine behind the whole project, and I'd rather say it than not.
Men used to die protecting their families, their faith, and their natural rights against tyranny. Today a different kind of dying is happening — suicide, despair, quiet collapse. People are crushed under an economy that feels rigged, a culture that mocks the commandments they were raised on, and a system that has steadily pushed fathers and husbands out of their proper role at the head of the home.
I don't think the answer is to burn the system down. Two wrongs don't make a right, and that's not what God, Mother Earth, and the Universe ask of us. But I do think we should be honest about how we got here. When the family weakens, the state grows to fill the gap. When faith retreats from public life, bureaucracy and credentialed experts move in to tell us how to live, how to feel, and what to medicate. The founders built this country assuming a religious and self-governing people. Strip out the religion and the self-government, and what's left is dependency.
When someone is struggling, I don't think the first move should be to hand themselves over to a therapist, a prescription, or a state program. Some of those people do real good, and there are foundational structures of infrastructure where, when we band together, good things happen — I'm not denying that. But as a culture we've inverted the order. The system around them too often treats ordinary human suffering as a disease to be managed rather than a passage to be walked through. Suffering is part of life. Without it, there's no depth, no gratitude, no real joy when good times come. The saints knew this. Our grandparents knew this.
The first answer should be the older one. Live by faith. Love your neighbor. Lean on the wisdom your ancestors and good-hearted teachers passed down. Pick up a craft or a skill — something that builds you. Get away from people who don't have your best interest at heart. Study faith. Sit with the time-tested answers before reaching for the new ones. The pew, the workbench, the dinner table, the trusted friend — those come first. The rest is for when those aren't enough.
SQUEIL doesn't address the soul part of any of this. Software can't, and shouldn't pretend to. SQUEIL addresses the dependency part — and only the dependency part. If people can run real businesses without renting their existence from a stack of extractive vendors, they have more time, more margin, and more dignity to spend on what actually matters: faith, family, neighbors, and craft. That's what I want for people. That's what I want for our children.
Hope SQUEIL can give you time for what matters.
— Patrick Roden
Founder, SQUEIL
I believe the resurrection is real and ongoing as the moral and spiritual gifts it produces. I believe Christ comes back when we choose to forgive our neighbor, when we provide some service of our own accord without expectation, not as a grand revelation event set in stone. I don't envision SQUEIL ever being a marketplace for religious services or products. I don't see it carrying political media as a product category. The platform still serves everyone who builds on it, regardless of their creed or party. You don't have to hold my spiritual and political beliefs to build using SQUEIL products and services — but you will have to meet practical market and merit-based standards.