About

I'm Glade Francis. I've been building software and web applications in Salt Lake City since 2007. I run a software development shop called Struxr.

For most of my career, my core work was client websites, SEO, and small web applications. Building a full-scale software product from scratch required a team and months of runway. Pairing nearly twenty years of software architecture with modern AI tooling changed that math—now I can design, test, and run much larger software systems myself while still doing the web and search work I've done for decades.

There's a popular take right now that SaaS is dead. I don't buy it. Big, one-size-fits-all SaaS is what's dying. For years, small businesses got pushed into the "nobody ever got fired for buying Salesforce" trap—sitting through endless demos with sales reps and paying thousands a month for bloated platforms where they only touch ten percent of the features.

SaaS didn't die; it moved down a level. Now it makes sense to build sharp, niche software for specific trades, or to take a solid product and customize it directly around how a specific ten-person company operates.

That's how CPA Relay started. My wife runs a CPA firm, and every practice management tool on the market got in her way during tax season. She walked me through the pain points and I built CPA Relay to her specs. I also run PayPolka for service business billing and Krux CRM for small teams.

The website and SEO world is in just as much flux. AI has made it easy for anyone to spin up a passable website in an afternoon, and AI assistants are changing how people search. Honestly, that's great—nobody should pay an agency ten thousand dollars for a basic brochure site anymore. But when generating code and copy gets cheap, judgment becomes the bottleneck. Knowing how to migrate a domain without tanking ten years of search traffic, structuring clean static HTML that Google and AI crawlers actually read, and turning a messy business into clear pages that convert still takes experience.

When I take on outside client work—whether that's building or redesigning a website, handling SEO, customizing one of my existing products, or replacing a tangle of spreadsheets with a custom web app—you work directly with someone who has been doing this since 2007 and knows where the landmines are buried.

I occasionally post on X as @tiller_ing. If you want to talk, send me a note.