Why I Build Tools for People the Tech Industry Overlooks

March 28, 2026

The tech industry has a blind spot. Most software is built for people who already have advantages — educated professionals, established businesses, people with clean digital footprints and strong credit scores. The tools, platforms, and products that dominate the market serve the needs of people who are already doing well. But some of the most meaningful problems in software exist at the margins, where the people who need help the most have the fewest options. This realization has driven much of the work I’ve done over the past few years. From FixMyRecord, a tool that helps people clean up their online records and reclaim their digital identity, to the Resilience platform, which supports people navigating the reentry process after incarceration — I keep finding myself drawn to building for populations that mainstream tech ignores.

The Reentry Gap

When someone leaves incarceration, they face a staggering number of barriers. Finding housing, securing employment, reconnecting with family, navigating parole requirements — and increasingly, managing a digital presence that often contains outdated or inaccurate information that follows them indefinitely. The tech industry has largely ignored this population. There are thousands of apps for managing your stock portfolio or ordering food delivery, but almost nothing purpose-built for someone trying to rebuild their life after incarceration. This gap isn’t just a market opportunity — it’s a failure of imagination and empathy in how we decide what problems are worth solving.

Digital Identity as a Barrier

One of the most pernicious barriers people face is their digital identity. Old mugshots that appear in Google searches. Outdated records on data broker sites. Background check databases that contain errors or expunged records that should no longer be visible. These digital artifacts can prevent someone from getting a job, an apartment, or even a date — long after they’ve served their time and moved on. This is why I built FixMyRecord. The tool automates the process of finding and removing inaccurate or outdated personal records from data broker sites, background check databases, and search engine results. It’s a problem that affects millions of people, yet before tools like this existed, the only option was expensive legal help or spending hundreds of hours filing removal requests manually.

Gamification for Good

With the Resilience app, I took a different approach. Rather than building a traditional case management tool — the kind of software that organizations use to track people — I wanted to build something that the person themselves would actually want to use. Something that felt empowering rather than surveilling. The solution was gamification, but not the shallow kind you see in most consumer apps. Resilience uses quest chains, skill trees, and achievement systems modeled on game design principles to make the reentry process feel more manageable and less overwhelming. Complete your parole check-in? That’s a quest completion. Attend a job training session? You’re building your skills tree. These aren’t trivial rewards — they’re psychological anchors that help people see their progress during a process that can feel impossibly long and uncertain.

Why This Matters for Tech

Building for underserved populations isn’t charity work disguised as engineering. It’s some of the most challenging and rewarding product development you can do. The constraints are real — your users may have limited internet access, older devices, lower digital literacy, and deep mistrust of technology. These constraints force you to build better software: more accessible, more intuitive, more resilient. The principles I’ve learned building for these populations have made every other product I work on better. When you design for someone who might be accessing your tool from a library computer with a slow connection, you end up building something that works better for everyone.

The Business Case

There’s also a pragmatic argument here. The populations that mainstream tech overlooks represent enormous underserved markets. Over 70 million Americans have some form of criminal record. Millions more deal with inaccurate data broker listings or damaging search results. These aren’t niche markets — they’re massive populations with real problems and real willingness to pay for solutions. The opportunity exists precisely because most tech companies don’t see it. They’re too focused on building the next productivity app for knowledge workers or the next social platform for teenagers. The spaces they ignore are the spaces where a solo builder with the right perspective can make both an impact and a business.

What Drives the Work

At its core, this work comes from a belief that technology should serve everyone, not just the people who are already well-served. Every product I build carries this principle. Whether it’s helping a local business understand its AI visibility through LocalMention, or helping someone remove a decade-old mugshot from Google through FixMyRecord, the through-line is the same: use technology to level playing fields that are currently tilted against the people who need help the most. The tech industry doesn’t need another project management tool or another social media app. It needs more builders willing to look at the hard problems, the unglamorous problems, the problems that exist at the intersection of technology and human dignity. That’s where the most important work is.

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