One of the most interesting comments I’ve heard from a Ryvet beta user was:
“It took away all the procrastination from quoting a job.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
Most estimates don’t get delayed because they’re difficult to build. They get delayed because getting started takes work. You have to gather information, find old projects, check pricing, review drawings, and get your head around the project before you can even begin estimating.
The longer I’ve owned and operated a sign company, the more I’ve realized that getting started is often the hardest part.
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A lot of people assume estimating starts when you begin calculating labor and materials.
In reality, estimating usually starts much earlier.
A project lands in your inbox. You open the drawings. Maybe there are multiple locations. Maybe the rendering looks great but doesn’t contain enough information to tell you how the sign is actually going to be built. Maybe it’s similar to something you’ve done before, but you can’t quite remember which project.
Before you estimate anything, you start gathering information.
You look for similar jobs. You pull up old estimates. You check supplier pricing. You review site photos. You make notes about questions that need answers.
Sometimes thirty minutes goes by before you’ve added a single line item to an estimate.
What I’ve learned from the estimators I’ve worked with is that experienced people are incredibly good at this part of the process. Not because they work harder, but because they’ve built up a mental library over years of doing the work.
They’ve seen similar projects before.
They know where to look.
They know which details matter.
They know what can probably be ignored.
Newer estimators don’t have that advantage yet. Every project feels new because, in many cases, it is.
One thing that surprised me while building Ryvet is that customers rarely talk about replacing estimators. That’s what software companies like to talk about. Actual users don’t.
What they talk about is momentum.
Give an experienced estimator a decent starting point and they’ll immediately start improving it.
“This labor is too high.”
“We’d build this differently.”
“We should account for another installation day.”
They move quickly because they’re reacting to something instead of starting from nothing.
That’s where the value is.
As a sign company owner, I spend most of my day bouncing between sales, operations, production questions, customer issues, vendor conversations, and whatever fire decided to show up that morning. By the time I sit down to estimate something, I’m already carrying the mental load of everything else that happened that day.
I don’t procrastinate because I don’t want to estimate.
I procrastinate because getting into estimate mode takes effort.
That’s the part I think people often miss.
The beta user who made that comment wasn’t talking about estimate accuracy. He wasn’t talking about AI. He wasn’t talking about automation.
He was talking about friction.
The software helped him get started.
And the more customer conversations I have, the more I think that’s what many people are actually looking for.
Not a magic estimate button.
Just a faster path from a blank page to a working estimate.
Sometimes that’s enough to make a meaningful difference.