7 Design Tool Success Stories [2023]

Hi, I’m Bill Spohn, President, CEO, and majority owner of TruTech Tools, LTD. Eric Preston is my trusted business partner. Our business continues to grow as we complement each other's personalities so well. TruTech is one of the largest online stores in the niche market of tools and test instruments for Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration (HVAC/R) Technicians. We are also the major supplier to a smaller market of technicians that do energy audits and assess building performance, including indoor air quality. We serve customers in the US and Canada.

I founded the company with Jim Bergmann, Jr, and his dad, Jim Sr. (who passed in 2016). The business was intended as a retirement “hobby” for Jim Sr. as both his son and I had full-time jobs. After I bought them out (with Eric noted above) in 2014, we have continued to have a great relationship with Jim Jr. and have continued to build each others’ businesses. The interesting thing is, I have always worked remotely (100 miles away) from the majority of the staff at the offices/warehouse.

Hi! My name is Vít Kalisz. I’m a co-founder and the CEO of OrgPad. We started working on the project about four years ago but the idea had been forming since the early 1980s. Today, we help over 17,000 people with their studies and work.

Our team’s decisions are based on three core values: ease of use, universality, and connecting people. We believe that a good tool is one you don't even realize you're using. Ideally, a toddler should be able to use the product by pure intuition. At the same time, the tool must remain as powerful as possible. If you balance out the first two values, you have a good product. If you want a great product, it's the people around it who make it and that’s doubly true for OrgPad. That's why we've been building a strong community of people around OrgPad since day one, people who are fanatical about our product and support us wherever they go. This is what’s made the project grow organically without us spending a single cent on advertising. Today, we earn roughly a thousand dollars a month and our revenue is growing rapidly every month.