The Squatch Is Real: Why We Built Our Own Shop Software
Every Pacific Northwest town has a guy who swears he’s seen Bigfoot. Our version of that story starts: a master tech swears he can build better shop software than the stuff he’s paying for every month. The difference is, we have screenshots.
Squatch Soft grew out of a working European auto shop in Idaho’s Treasure Valley — three locations, a lot of BMWs, and a front counter that lives or dies by its software. For years that software was rented: per-seat pricing, modules behind paywalls, and our own guest history sitting on somebody else’s server, in somebody else’s format, retrievable at somebody else’s pleasure.
So we built ShopDesk. Not as a startup idea — as a tool. It went live in our own shops first, which is the harshest beta program on earth. Service advisors are not known for gentle feedback. Every clumsy click got reported by lunch; every missing report got requested by Friday. What’s running today — the job board, the inspections, the text-message appointment confirmations, the end-of-day close — earned its place the hard way.
Somewhere along the line it stopped being “our shop’s program” and started being a product other shops could run. That’s what Squatch Soft is: the little studio around ShopDesk (and whatever we build next), run by the same people who turn the wrenches.
Why the name? Because good software for independent shops is a lot like Bigfoot — everybody’s heard the stories, nobody can quite prove it exists, and the big guys insist the blurry thing in the trees is just a bear. It’s not a bear. It’s us, and we’re friendlier than we look.
This site is new. The docs are the full ShopDesk manual, published in the open because software you own shouldn’t come with a mysterious manual. The blog — these field notes — is where we’ll write about building in public: what ships, what breaks, and what we learn running a software company from a building that also does brake jobs.
Tracks welcome. Follow along.
— The Squatch Soft crew