I remember it as if it were yesterday: the day Toni Gilabert, now Managing Director of Whatcolor, walked into our office together with David Navarro. Back then, David was one of those designers who carried a Mac in one hand and FreeHand in the other.
Whatcolor manufactures curtains and panels for professional installers, and they were looking for a way to make designing and quoting their products easier.
The old meeting room in our Sant Cugat office, where that first encounter took place.
And there I was, with my sales pitch already running through my head while every instinct I had was telling me to keep my mouth shut. So I did what I knew best: I grabbed a pack of biscuits, took a couple of Coca-Colas out of the fridge, and showed them what I had been working on.
It was an integrated system designed to bring all the company's information together in one place. I told them it was going to be a long journey. That it wasn't going to be easy. That, little by little, departments would start talking to each other through computers instead of printers. And that we would eventually tackle the challenge of designing their products too, but first we needed to build a solid foundation.
I've always believed that it is better to fix the root cause of a problem than to keep applying band-aid fixes.
Toni told me he had already seen many software solutions promising exactly the same thing. I replied with something that, ten years later, I still believe:
"Those programs belong to someone else. This one will be yours."
To my surprise, he decided to trust Redsauce.
Little did I know what we were getting ourselves into.
And yes, there were some very tense moments. I remember one in particular that almost brought the whole project down. We had a critical bug that we simply couldn't solve. Not even the debugger could help us find it. We came very close to sitting down with Toni, explaining that we couldn't finish the project, and offering to return all the money he had paid us so far.
Toni told us something I still remember:
"We've been through worse."
And he was right.
It turned out to be one of those problems where a program works perfectly on your development machine but fails on the customer's computer. Every developer knows that sentence:
"But it works on my machine."
And that wasn't the only challenge. Performance problems forced us to redesign entire parts of the system, introducing job queues and load distribution much earlier than we had expected. Looking back, it was actually a blessing. We learned a painful but valuable lesson: performance testing cannot be an afterthought. It has to be part of the project from the very beginning.
Today, ten years later, I'm back at Whatcolor.
The factory is huge. We continue digitizing one area after another, optimizing every process where time can be saved, and, above all, talking to the people who do the work every day to understand where they add value and where they are simply doing work that a computer should handle.
There is one rule that rarely fails: the moment someone opens an Excel spreadsheet or starts doing repetitive work that a computer should be doing, that's exactly where we get to work.
Ten years ago, we were connecting departments. Today, we're connecting knowledge.
And then artificial intelligence arrived.
If everything goes as planned, we will soon be writing the next chapter of this story.
And I have a feeling it will be the most exciting one yet.
Here we go.