Kevin Spahn.

I’ve spent most of my working life in the painting trade. I founded Paintcrafters in the Minneapolis area in 2015, after years painting for others, and have run it since. Ladders, customers’ homes, and quoting and delivering real work for the better part of two decades.

Before the trade I earned a BA in Art History from the University of Minnesota, worked in the Modern Art department of the Israel Museum, managed a Minneapolis nightclub, and tried my hand at a few small ventures in marketing, web design and consulting. Running a painting company put me on the receiving end of every software tool sold to home-services contractors, from the pay-per-lead marketplaces that sent my first customers to the all-in-one platforms that cost a steep monthly fee, weeks of setup, and hours of admin every week. None of them fit the way a small owner-operator actually works.

So I built the tool I wanted. AI coding tools, Claude Code in particular, let one person carry product, full-stack code and self-hosted infrastructure for several production systems at once, work that would have been out of reach a few years ago. The throughline is a conviction that the best products come from people who’ve lived the problem. Painter’s Log, software for painting contractors built by someone who has done the work, is my all-in bet.