About the founder
Built from problems I kept watching businesses deal with.
I’m 18 years old, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve spent decades running a contracting company.
What I have spent years around are the people who do.
Several members of my family are contractors, and my girlfriend’s father is a contractor as well. I’ve watched firsthand how much of their day isn’t actually spent doing the work they’re good at.
It’s spent dealing with everything around it.
- Customer messages.
- Quotes.
- Invoices.
- Scheduling.
- Follow-ups.
- Different software platforms.
- Jobs that need attention.
- Customers waiting for responses.
- Important information buried beneath everything else happening in the business.
And I’ve seen what happens when those systems don’t work together very well.
A missed message isn’t just a missed notification. It can mean a lost job.
A customer that doesn’t get followed up with can mean lost revenue.
An invoice or issue that gets buried can become a much bigger problem later.
That’s what led to Northwarden.
I didn’t build Northwarden because I thought contractors needed another complicated piece of software.
I started building it because the contractors around me already had enough software.
What they needed was a better way to understand what was happening across all of it and know what actually required their attention.
That’s the problem Northwarden is being built to solve.
Maddex LaFountain
Founder, Northwarden
The honest question
Why build this at 18?
Being outside the industry can be an advantage.
I wasn’t looking at these problems as “that’s just how contracting works.”
I was looking at them and asking why they had to work that way at all.
Northwarden is being developed alongside feedback from real contractors and small-business owners.
The goal isn’t to tell contractors how to run their companies.
The goal is to listen to the problems they already deal with and build technology that removes as much of that friction as possible.
“I’m not trying to teach contractors how to run their businesses. I’m building Northwarden because I’ve watched how much unnecessary work gets in the way of actually running one.”