Hello Ottomator community! I was pointed here by Cole to ask for community help. I hope everyone is doing well. My name is Tim Carter, and I’m a telecommunications professional/entrepreneur with a passion and hobbyist for telecom, AI and ML. I have spent my career in the telecoms, building much of US and Canada’s networks on the Core and RAN side, along with several data centers and MSC’s. In 2012 I started a business in Canada building infrastructure for the major telcos across Canada, only to find that the industry is very unregulated and very “old boys club”. After the pandemic, it became almost impossible to make a profit as I was setup nationally and had huge CAPEX debt load and high fixed OPEX making it very difficult to down size to adapt to the crippling industry (carriers stopped building wireless and are focusing on fiber back haul to support higher bandwidth to every market, along with AI bandwidth load increases). Along with that, Canadian business in general suffered from high interest rates, struggling economy and the highest inflation in history. All these things led to me losing my business and being left with massive debt load and facing bankruptcy. Sorry to whine here, just trying to give some context to my situation.
The main reason there is so much blood on the floor, is that companies my size are being replaced by single crew/tech size companies that have no overhead and can undercut and still make a profit (many work out of their house and work around the clock to make it work), making mid size companies like mine lose market share at an unprecedented rate. The major telcos here (Rogers/Telus/Bell) are going direct to these size guys and driving pricing through the floor. Unfortunately for folks like myself, carrying all the overhead for a proper operation can’t compete with their prices, and the telcos starting bringing out 15+ of these size companies to every bid opportunity. Needless to say it made for a very stressful couple of years before I needed to close my doors.
Now that you have some context as to who I am and where I come from, here is my request. I am trying to build a web app that fills a void in this industry that allows contractors like myself to stop carrying the overhead and just manage the contracts and directly work with crews / techs all over the country by building in a project management based web app that utilized AI tools to dissect scopes of work (from PDF’s, Docs and SS’s), build budgets, time lines, BOM’s, schedules, etc, and auto assign them to users (tech / crews) based on their geolocation, skill sets and availability. It also encompasses health and safety processes and scope of work knowledge bases (chatbot right on their phone) to assist in the daily work, troubleshooting, and completion packages (AI photo recognition), along with AI assisted testing requirements in the field (interface via web-app to software driven test gear). The idea is to eliminate the need for people to travel all over the country away from their families and into remote markets that already have similarly skilled people living. As the industry is highly unregulated, it would also build a community of workers that would be able to take back the control of how much a job should cost and be able to eventual mandate a specific price point. Right now, the telcos dictate how much each task is paid, or invite so many contractors out they scare them into pricing very tight and most likely too low quotes to make a profit. The telcos also stopped paying any change orders for the dozens of reasons a project can be delayed (weather, telco support service delays, equipment delays, etc). There are several other features I have detailed for this web-app however not essential to the MVP.
I honestly believe this would be a great opportunity to help change the industry and give some power back to the folks that actually build the infrastructure and networks. Could be a great impact on the mental health of these workers too, as many of them struggle because of the road lifestyle that is unavoidable the way things are setup.
If you’re able to help with building some of the workflows, UI/UX or backend to make the AI assistance and database/knowledge base RAG systems work better, it would be amazing. DM or reply if you think you can help. I have limited programming background, although I did a lot of SQL and MML in my career. Just looking for a helping hand to get be through some of the struggles I’m in. I’ve been using bolt.new, cursor, bolt.diy, n8n, and local ollama with qwen or deepseek (7b), and some other API calls to assist in my project.