Built by a tech who’s been in your shoes

I’m Robert Dale Smith, and I’ve been in the repair business since 2006. I worked at Friendly Computers — their most profitable franchise location in the country. I built the in-shop bench setup and workflow that they mirrored to every future franchise. I lived and breathed repair operations.

The tools we had were terrible. Corporate gave us FAST (Friendly Appointment Scheduling Tech), a customer management app that couldn’t even create work orders. We’d double-enter customers, hand-write invoices, and manually reconcile everything at the end of the day. Our team used to joke about building “FASTer” — the app FAST should have been. One of our early guys even wrote a VB.net desktop app just to print work orders because FAST couldn’t.

I left in 2009 to start my own shop, then went back to university to study computer science. The dream of better repair shop software never went away. Every tool I tried had the same problems: too expensive, too complicated, or built by someone who’d never worked a bench.

techsbox is the app I always wanted — the tool FAST should have been. Full circle from living the pain of broken repair shop software to building the solution. It’s designed for the way repair techs actually work: check in a device, track the repair, invoice the customer, move on to the next one.

No bloated feature lists full of stuff you’ll never use. No per-user pricing that punishes you for growing. No enterprise sales calls. Just a straightforward tool that helps you run your shop and get paid.

techsbox is still early. We’re building in public, listening to feedback from real repair techs, and shipping features that matter. If you’ve got ideas or feedback, I genuinely want to hear it — that’s how this thing gets better.