Free assessment

Your business runs on six tools that don't talk to each other

A quote in a spreadsheet. Job notes in a group chat. The schedule on a whiteboard. Invoices in a browser tab. And the person holding all of it together is you, at 9pm, on a Tuesday.

Operator Stack builds software for businesses shaped like yours. Somebody asks what it costs, you price it, you book it, you do it, you get paid — window cleaning, painting, apparel decoration. Custom systems for the parts no off-the-shelf tool will ever fit, and three live products if you decorate apparel.

Take the free assessment See the products

Q3 2026 · one shop wins a website built free · closes September 30

Live products
Three
Free to start
All of them
Trades served
Three
Website turnaround
5 days

01 / The shape of the problem

Every job travels the same road

Somebody needs windows cleaned, a house painted, three hundred shirts printed. Between that thought and the money landing, you touch the job six times — and the losses are almost never in the work itself. They are at the joins, where information gets re-typed from one tool into another, or falls out of the process entirely.

The nouns change by trade. The road does not, which is the only reason one person can build for a window cleaner and a print shop without being a generalist about either.

01

They find you

Or they don't, and they call the outfit across town instead.

Website
02

They ask what it costs

With everything you need to answer, or — far more often — a one-line email with none of it.

Website
03

You price it

Your rules, your numbers, your margin. The same answer on a Thursday as on a Tuesday.

Airtable
04

You book it in

Which crew, which day, which press. And what happens to the week when one job slips.

Airtable
05

You do the work

The part you're actually good at, and the only part of this road nobody needs help with.

Yours
06

You get paid

Invoiced from the job rather than from memory, and chased before it hits sixty days.

Airtable

No single piece of software runs that whole road. The all-in-one platforms that claim to cost more than most small operators want to spend, and two-thirds of what you'd pay for sits unused. So I build the pieces separately, and join up the ones you already have.

02 / Who this is for

Same road, different nouns

Pick your trade and I'll make the argument in your language, with the leaks that actually happen in your business rather than a generic version of them.

Residential routes · Commercial contracts

Window cleaning

Recurring residential routes and commercial contracts, run out of one place instead of a phone and a notebook.

See the detail →

Interior · Exterior · Residential and commercial

House painting

Estimates that stop taking an evening, change orders that survive an argument, and crews that know where they are on Monday.

See the detail →

Screen print · Embroidery · DTF

Apparel decoration

Screen print, embroidery and DTF. Quoting, art approvals, group orders and fulfilment — the trade I actually work in.

See the detail →
Not on the list? Landscaping, house cleaning, roofing and the rest of the trades work exactly the same way — I just haven't written the page yet. If your business quotes, books, does and invoices, the road above is yours. Take the assessment and I'll answer in your language anyway.

03 / Products · for apparel decorators

Three tools. All live. All free to start.

These three are built specifically for screen print, embroidery and DTF shops — if you clean windows or paint houses, skip to the services below; none of this will help you. Each does a single job properly instead of forty adequately. Use one, use all three, or use none: they work on their own and don't require hiring me.

Pricely

Quote smarter, win more jobs

A pricing calculator that actually knows how decorated apparel is priced. Sixteen pricing engines across screen print, embroidery, DTF, and laser — flat rate, matrix, contract, cost-plus, hourly, stitch tiers, area-based. Build profiles per customer, quote in seconds, and track every job as won or lost with the reason why.

  • 16 pricing engines, 4 decoration methods
  • Win rate, revenue, and contribution margin at a glance
  • AI tier that quotes by chat and drafts your follow-ups

Free · Pro $4.99/mo · Pro AI $9.99/mo

pricely.ink

GroupKit

Group orders, finally under control

A coach orders thirty jerseys and every one needs a different size, name, and number. Instead of an email chain and a spreadsheet, you send one link with a passcode. Members submit their own details, pay if you want them to, and you get a production-ready summary. Or run an always-on branded storefront.

  • Shareable order links with passcode protection
  • Persistent pop-up storefronts with your branding
  • Stripe checkout or organizer-pays, CSV straight to production

Free · Pro · Growth

getgroupkit.com

Packed

Everything between the order and the door

Drag items into boxes, buy discounted USPS, UPS, and FedEx labels per box or all at once, print packing slips on your own template, and send a branded tracking email. Works the same whether you ship it, drive it over, or hand it across the counter.

  • Multi-carrier live rates and bulk label buying
  • Drag-and-drop packing slip and 4×6 label designer
  • REST API and webhooks for Shopify, Etsy, or your own system

Free · Pro $9/mo

packed.ink

04 / Work I do for you

When the product doesn't reach far enough

Products solve the problems every shop shares. The ones that are specific to how your shop runs need building. That's the other half of what I do.

Service 01 · from $500

Websites

A front door that gets found in your town, looks like the shop you actually are, and turns a stranger into a quote request you can price without a single follow-up email. Six pages, five business days, fixed price.

See what's included →

Service 02 · quoted per job

Airtable systems

The connective tissue. Quotes, jobs, art status, capacity, and reporting in one place that reflects how your shop actually works — instead of four tools and a spreadsheet nobody trusts.

How it works →

Service 03 · quoted per job

Custom apps on Replit

The thing your shop does that no software does — including mine. Internal tools, customer portals, and AI applied where it earns its place, with a straight answer about where it doesn't yet.

What I build →

05 / Where to start

Which of the five is costing you the most?

Fourteen questions on how work actually reaches your shop. Three findings on screen the moment you finish, then I open your site myself and send you what I see. Free, and there is nothing to buy at the end.

Straight away

Three findings on screen — where the chain is breaking, based on how work reaches you today.

Within two working days

A human look at your actual site. Where you rank for your town, what your quote form is costing you, and the one thing worth fixing first.

Either way

One fix you can do yourself this week. And if a new website is not your problem, I will say so rather than sell you one.

Take the free assessment Just the two-minute audit

Q3 2026 · finish it and you are entered to win a website built free · closes September 30

06 / Why not a generalist

A generalist would have to ask you what the job actually costs

There are plenty of good developers who'd take your project. Almost none of them have priced a job at 6am, watched an afternoon disappear on an enquiry that was never worth taking, or had to explain to a customer why the thing they asked for costs more than the thing they thought they asked for.

Three trades is not the same as no trade. What they share is a shape — quote, book, do, get paid — and I run a business with exactly that shape, which is a different qualification from having read about one.

The decisions are pre-made

Minimums, recurring work, deposits, change orders, the seasonal rush that wrecks your schedule. I'm not learning how small operations work on your budget.

I run one of these

Alpine Apparel Co, in Castle Rock. Different trade from yours, possibly — but a small operation that quotes work, books it, does it and chases the invoice is the same animal whether the work is shirts or windows.

Narrow, and compounding

Everything I learn in one build makes the next one better, because they are the same shape. That stops being true the moment I take on a business that isn't — which is why I turn those down.

Who's behind this

Jesse Poteet

I'm a developer who ended up in the print business, or a printer who ended up writing software — depending on which day you ask.

I've spent years building operational systems on Airtable — for small businesses, and on projects for teams inside large organizations where the spreadsheets were bigger but the underlying problem was identical: too many tools, none of them talking, and one person quietly holding it together.

I also run Alpine Apparel, a print shop in Castle Rock, Colorado. That's where Pricely, GroupKit, and Packed came from — every one of them started as a problem I had on a Tuesday and couldn't buy my way out of.

Four of the apps I've built on Replit are in production right now, used by shops around the country. Operator Stack is my own shop, and it serves one industry on purpose.

07 / The rest of it

I'm not visiting this industry

Operator Stack is the software half. The other half is a press in Castle Rock, a YouTube channel, a couple of communities, and several thousand printers who ask me questions every week. That's where the product ideas come from — and it's the reason I don't have to be briefed on how a shop runs.

I print

Alpine Apparel Co Water-based screen printing in Castle Rock since 2017. Every product here started as a problem I hit on the press. Contract printing Shops send me the water-based and discharge work they'd rather not retool for.

I teach

YouTube 120+ videos on technique, DTF, pricing and running a shop. Free. Startup Screen Printing The hub — free resources, plus a $29 course on the business side of printing. Screen Printing Toolbox The equipment and software I actually use, so you skip buying the wrong thing first.

I host

The Print Crew A free Discord for people who already own a shop and want to talk real decisions. Screen Print Collective Technique-first membership with Jennifer Sanderson. Waitlist while it opens. Print for Profit Challenge Three sessions on profitability and pricing with Jonathan Overmyer.

Published & interviewed at

The Apparelist Podcast interview Interviewed on discounting and print-shop pricing, plus video segments on water-based color matching, niching, and email marketing. Ryonet · ScreenPrinting.com Guest contributor Guest articles on Ryonet's blog, including the path from graphic designer to running a water-based shop.

None of this is what you're buying here — it's just why the person building your systems already knows what a flash cure costs you in throughput.

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Systems that actually support the work

Short, practical notes for people running a shop: what to automate, what to leave alone, and what your software is quietly costing you in time. Written from inside a working print shop, not from a product roadmap.

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Find out where your shop is leaking work

Answer fourteen questions and I'll tell you where work is falling on the floor between someone wanting shirts and you getting paid for it — then I open your site myself and send you what I see. Free. And this quarter it enters you to win a website built free.

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