Alowh

Context

Alowh started as me, a laptop, and a first client. Over nearly seven years it became a delivery team serving more than twenty clients across nonprofit, education, healthcare, and government, including U.S. government contracts. The products we built for clients went on to generate millions in revenue for them. I closed the agency in March 2025 to focus on Luxxera.

Running the business

Running an agency is the part of my background that looks least like an engineering-manager role on paper and most like it in practice.

• I was the client-facing lead on every engagement: met with department heads and end users to pull out requirements, wrote the specifications, managed scope and timelines, and provided the service that kept clients coming back.
• Built the operating practices from scratch: hiring, onboarding, project management, and a client-facing engagement guide that standardized scope and made delivery dates predictable.
• Gave technical direction to a small delivery team across concurrent projects, which is where I learned to estimate honestly and say no early.
• Won and delivered government contracts against fixed scope, budget, and timeline under public-sector compliance and data-handling requirements.

The work

Every sector brought its own standard, so the team adapted accessibility, security, and data handling per client rather than shipping one template.

• A full-stack rebuild of an outdated and vulnerable university website, later the basis for my in-house role at Southern Virginia University.
• A consumer genetics product, True DNA Story, whose report generator fed dashboards clinicians used to consult with patients.
• A multi-vendor art marketplace, ArtandMe, which was later sold.
• A realtor dashboard built for one Texas company that grew into a tool used by teams nationwide.
• A wedding-vendor marketplace, WedAhead, and a cross-platform iOS and Android app, Find Me, built in Flutter.
• Custom PHP back ends, Java Android apps, and integrations into whatever systems the client already ran.

What I took from it

• Clients don't buy code, they buy predictability. The engagement guide did more for retention than any technical decision.
• Hiring for an agency taught me to hire for judgment over stack. The stack changes every engagement; judgment doesn't.
• Seven years of scoping other people's ideas is a good education in telling a founder what will and won't work before the money is spent.