HammerDuck › About
There's No Corporate Office. There's Just Me.
Every other platform you've used for home projects has a headquarters somewhere you'll never visit and a support queue you'll never get past. HammerDuck has an owner who lives twenty minutes from you and answers his own email. Here's who that is and why this exists.
Urbon Thompson · Founder, HammerDuck
Who's behind this
I'm Urbon. I Built This Myself, and I Live Here.
I'm a retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer who served for 21 years, followed by another six as a Department of the Army and Department of the Navy civil servant. These days my work is program management, compliance, and improving the systems and processes organizations depend on. I also have a degree in marketing which, after all these years, finally found a use.
But long before program management, compliance, and marketing, I was an Army Engineer.
I know what it's like to work in the trades. The long days, the early mornings, the grueling heat, the physical work, and the satisfaction that comes from looking at something you built and knowing you did it right. I also understand that running a small service business means wearing a lot of hats. You're not just doing the work. You're finding customers, answering calls, managing schedules, dealing with paperwork, and trying to make a living.
Over the course of my career I've spent two decades watching what happens when systems get built around the people running them instead of the people they're supposed to serve. I know what a broken process looks like from the inside. I also know it's easier to complain about one than to build something better.
That's where HammerDuck came from. There isn't a boardroom here. There aren't investors telling me what the CSRA needs. There aren't quarterly targets being handed down by people who have never been to Augusta. There's one person who decided to build the thing instead of waiting for somebody else to, and who would rather act on an idea, learn from it, and correct course than sit on it wondering what could have been.
Why I actually built it
Hurricane Helene Made the Problem Impossible to Ignore.
I live in the CSRA. When Helene came through, I watched neighbors try to get a roof or a tree service scheduled and get nowhere, while the apps on their phones sent their information to crews four states away and charged local Pros for every phone call whether or not it turned into a job. That's not a hypothetical for me. I saw it happen to people I know.
- I'm not testing a market here before moving on to the next one
- I'm not backed by a national company that will pull out if the CSRA isn't profitable enough
- If something's broken, you're not filing a ticket into a queue, you're emailing me
- I built the flat pricing and county rules specifically so a two-truck outfit isn't buried by a twenty-truck one
That's the whole pitch.
One local guy, a clear set of rules, and a platform built so the people doing the actual work don't get squeezed out. If that's worth a shot, here's where to start.