How I Built Quoting Software For Contractors Making $1,000/Month

November 15th, 2026

save

About
Business

Alex Aramendi

Founder, NexVolt

$1K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

NexVolt

nexvolt.us

from Duluth, GA

started June 2026

$1,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Alex recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on NexVolt? Check out these stories:

Who are you and what business did you start?

Hi, I'm Alex Aramendi, founder of NexVolt (nexvolt.us), based in Duluth, Georgia. NexVolt is quoting software for low-voltage contractors: the shops that pull network cable and install security cameras, access control and AV. Most of our customers are teams of 1 to 20 people who were quoting in Excel or Word.

What makes it different is that it's built only for this trade. You enter your own rates once, and every quote prices itself from your numbers: per drop, per camera, per door. Customers sign online and pay the invoice by card.

Today NexVolt brings in around $1,000 a month.

My image

How do you come up with the idea for NexVolt?

The idea came from the other side of the table. In my day job I request quotes from contractors, and I noticed two things.

First, the faster a quote came back, the more likely I was to go with that contractor. Second, in a corporate setting I'm required to collect several quotes to show I compared prices, even when I already know who I'll pick. So a lot of contractors spend hours on quotes that were only ever a checkbox.

That means contractors lose money twice: on slow quotes that lose jobs, and on quotes they were never going to win. Faster quotes, priced from their own rates and sent and signed online, seemed like the fix.

I'm not a contractor myself, but my work sits close to IT and building systems, so I knew the jobs. Before going further I built a demo and showed it to a contractor friend, and their feedback shaped the first real version.

How did you launch NexVolt and get initial traction?

I launched quietly in late July 2026. The first account went to someone I knew who runs low-voltage jobs and asked to use it. Having one real user early was worth more than any announcement: their feedback decided what got fixed first.

That relationship became my first paying customer in October, about three months after launch. Around the same time I opened self-serve signup with a 14-day free trial and no credit card, so a contractor can try it on a real job before paying anything.

The lesson: building the product was the easy part. Getting found was the hard part, and I should have started on marketing much earlier, alongside the build instead of after it.

What was the growth strategy for NexVolt and how did you scale?

Three channels are doing the work so far.

YouTube and social. I run a weekly show where I price a real-looking job from start to finish (a warehouse, an office, a hotel), plus short clips cut from each episode for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Contractors respond to seeing actual numbers more than to feature lists.

Articles and SEO. I write practical pricing guides: what to charge per drop, markup on materials, how to estimate labor hours, change orders. They live on the NexVolt site and on Medium. A surprise here: Bing picked up almost every page within weeks, while Google is much slower to trust a new site, so links from directories and other sites matter a lot.

Cold email. A small number of personal emails each day to contractors whose address is on their own website, written one at a time, never blasted. Slow, but every email reaches a real contractor.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building NexVolt?

Start getting found on day one. I treated marketing as something to do after the product was ready, and that was my biggest mistake. A new site takes months to earn trust with Google, directories take weeks to approve a listing, and an email domain needs weeks of warm-up before cold email lands in inboxes. All of those clocks could have been running while I built.

Pick a niche narrow enough that you understand its numbers. Low-voltage contractors think in drops, cameras, doors and labor hours. Speaking that language in the product and in every article does more than any general "small business software" pitch.

Look at your idea from the customer's customer. I found this one by being the person who requests quotes. The pain was obvious from my side of the table before any contractor described it.

Build it on the side and let it grow. I started NexVolt next to a full-time job, and I kept going because it kept being useful to real people.

Discover Similar Business Ideas Like NexVolt

	Idea	Revenue
Ai-powered resume builder rezi.ai AI-powered resume builder for job seekers.	AI-powered resume builder for job seekers.	$215K /mo
No-code Airtable API importer datafetcher.com API integration tool for Airtable users.	API integration tool for Airtable users.	$23K /mo
Trend discovery platform treendly.com Trend-spotting platform for untapped market insights.	Trend-spotting platform for untapped market insights.	$1K /mo
AI daily planning app structured.app Visual daily planner for focused productivity	Visual daily planner for focused productivity	$1K /mo
Podcast guest booking platform guestio.com Marketplace connecting podcast hosts with paid guest bookings	Marketplace connecting podcast hosts with paid guest bookings	$150K /mo
Open-source live support tool livehelperchat.com Open-source live chat platform for companies.	Open-source live chat platform for companies.	$7.5K /mo
Document leak deterrent tool g-71.com Data leak deterrence software with invisible document marking.	Data leak deterrence software with invisible document marking.	$10K /mo