I lost £12k in construction disputes. Then I built Siteezy to make sure no one else has to.
I've spent 12 years in construction. Started as a site manager, then moved into electrical contracting. I've managed jobs from £15k kitchen refits to £500k commercial builds. Along the way, I've lost more money to disputes than most people earn in a year.
In 2022, I was managing a 4-month renovation for a developer. Beautiful job. On time, on budget. But when we finished Phase 2, the client claimed we hadn't completed a variation that was worth £12,000.
I had taken photos. Dozens of them. But when the dispute came down to it, the photos had no timestamp, no GPS, no proof of when they were taken. I had notes on my phone from site visits, but they didn't say which day was which. I had email confirmations of the variation, but they could have been from a different project.
I lost £12,000 because I couldn't prove what I knew to be true: that I had done the work on the agreed date with the agreed specifications.
I spent the next 18 months talking to contractors across the UK. The same story kept coming up: disputes over timelines, disputes over variations, disputes over what was agreed and when. And in almost every case, the contractor had the proof—but it wasn't documented in a way that held up.
One electrician showed me a camera roll with 300 photos from a job. Beautiful photos. Clear work. But when a client disputed a timeline, he was scrolling through his phone trying to find the right photo, squinting at the timestamp that could have been from anywhere. He ended up writing off £850.
A roofing contractor had a site diary on paper. Detailed entries every day. But when a dispute went to arbitration, the arbitrator said "A piece of paper could have been written anytime." He needed photographic evidence with verifiable metadata.
That's when I realized: the problem wasn't lack of documentation. It was lack of *proof*. Contractors were documenting, but the documentation was worthless in a dispute because it couldn't be verified.
I spent 6 months building Siteezy. The goal was simple: make it impossible for a contractor to lose a dispute because of weak documentation. Every photo automatically gets timestamped to the second, GPS-locked to the exact location, and tagged to the right project. No manual data entry. No thinking. Just take the photo, and the proof is locked in.
The £12,000 I lost in that dispute paid for my learning. Now I'm on a mission to make sure no one else has to learn that lesson the hard way.
You can argue about what was agreed. You can't argue about a timestamped photo. Proof ends disputes before they start.
The best tool is the one people actually use. If documentation requires thinking, your crew won't do it. If it's automatic, they will.
You shouldn't lose £21k over 5 years because of broken documentation. One payment of £249 should be enough to protect your livelihood forever.
We do one thing: turn site photos into court-ready proof. We're not trying to be everything. We're trying to be perfect at one thing.
Construction is built on trust. Between contractors and clients, between team members, between suppliers and buyers. But trust breaks down when there's ambiguity.
A timestamped, GPS-locked photo removes ambiguity. It's not "he said, she said." It's proof. And proof makes trust automatic.
I'm building Siteezy because I believe that construction work should be rewarded fairly. You do the work, you get paid. You shouldn't lose money because your documentation didn't hold up in a dispute. Proof should be automatic. It should be simple. And it should be cheap.
If you've lost money to a dispute, I want to hear about it. Every story shapes what we build next.
Get in touchFounder pricing: £249 lifetime access. The same deal I wish I had when I lost that £12k.
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