This started with Ellen.

Ellen was good at this work long before Elastic Sales existed. Her background in interior and architectural design gave her a practical understanding of the people, products, and decisions behind a project. She built ELA Sales on that experience and on the trust she earned with manufacturers, designers, vendors, and clients.

Success brought more information to manage. Projects can stretch across years of conversations, quotes, revisions, purchase orders, invoices, commissions, and payments. The facts were rarely missing, but they were scattered across email, documents, accounting systems, and memory. Answering a simple question often meant reconstructing the history of a project first.

Like many reps, Ellen turned to spreadsheets. They were flexible, familiar, and much better than keeping everything in her head. She added formulas and macros as the business grew, but a spreadsheet could only show what had been entered into it. It could not keep the conversations, orders, commissions, payments, and relationships connected under a single umbrella.

That’s where I come in. Hi, I’m Aaron 👋 — Ellen’s son. I started my career in print and digital design, moved into web and user experience design, and eventually into systems architecture and full-stack software development. I build cloud software for a local engineering company, and information problems like this are the kind of problems I know how to solve.

I spent time with my mom learning how she actually worked: the trade vernacular, the major milestones, how one decision led to another, and where important details were most likely to disappear. I learned that her business process worked (and worked well!); it was the information system supporting it that didn’t. The aim was to capture the process she had developed through years of experience and build a system capable of supporting it.

Elastic Sales started as that system. It connected the work that had been spread across too many places and made the state of the business easier to see. As it took shape, we realized the problem was not unique to ELA Sales. Other independent representatives were doing the same work with the same collection of spreadsheets, inboxes, and disconnected tools. That was when Elastic Sales stopped being just a system for my mom and became something we thought might be useful to other reps. Turning it into a product they could use meant taking the code much further.

Elastic Sales is our way of sharing what worked for Ellen. It combines her knowledge of the business with my experience designing and building software, in a tool made for independent representatives who would rather spend their time on the work than piecing its history together.