Starting With The Big Problem

On June 8, 2026, I started something that felt too big for me.

That is probably the most honest beginning.

The project is called MyBidPilot.us, and the idea behind it is simple to say and much harder to build: help construction suppliers, steel building dealers, and subcontractors move from an incoming quote request all the way to a proposal, follow-up, and project setup without so much manual retyping and babysitting.

In plain English, I wanted a better way to deal with the messy middle of getting work.

A quote comes in. There may be a list of materials. Maybe a bill of materials. Maybe details buried in an email, a document, or a file. Then someone has to read it, pull out the important pieces, make sense of it, create a proposal, send it, remember to follow up, and if it turns into real work, set up the project.

That sounds like a straight line when I write it here.

In real life, it can feel like a junk drawer.

I kept thinking: if AI can summarize articles, write emails, and answer questions, could it help with this? Could it read a quote request and pull out the useful parts? Could it help turn that into a proposal? Could it keep the process moving instead of letting good opportunities disappear into a pile of busywork?

That was the hope.

Not magic. Not replacing people who know the construction business. More like a very patient assistant that does not get tired of copying details from one place to another.

The first version I chose to build was what I called the “happy path only.” That means I was not trying to handle every strange exception, every edge case, or every possible way a quote could arrive. I just wanted one clean path:

Upload a quote.

Let the AI extract the important information.

Create a bill of materials.

Generate a proposal.

Turn it into a project.

Even that felt enormous.

I am 50, and I do not come from a coding background. So when I looked at the full ambition — an autonomous construction revenue platform — part of me laughed. Not because the problem was funny, but because the gap between “I have an idea” and “this could run part of a business” looked like a canyon.

There were moments right at the start where I had to remind myself not to build the whole dream on day one. The phrase “massive scope” was not theoretical. It was sitting right there in front of me.

Quote ingestion. AI extraction. Proposal copy. Follow-ups. Project creation. Each one of those could become its own project if I let it.

So I tried to narrow my focus.

What is the smallest useful version of this idea?

For me, it was the pipeline. Not all the bells and whistles. Not the polished future version. Just proving that information could flow from one step to the next without me manually rebuilding it every time.

That is why this project started.

Because in construction and steel, speed matters. Accuracy matters. Following up matters. And yet so much of the work around getting the work can be repetitive and easy to drop when things get busy.

I wanted to see if AI could help carry some of that load.

I also wanted to see if someone like me — not a programmer, not a software professional, just a curious person willing to be confused in public — could build something real enough to test the idea.

I do not know yet how far it will go.

But I know why I started: I saw a practical problem, I saw AI getting better at reading and writing, and I wondered if those two things could meet in a useful way.

Small takeaway: big projects get less scary when I turn them into one simple path and take the first step.