From Corps of Engineers to App Store: Our Story

DVC didn't start with a pitch deck. It started with frustration.

The Problem Nobody Was Solving For 20 years, our founder managed construction programs for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of State, and the Department of Defense — billion-dollar projects across Japan, Guam, Australia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Three different agencies. Dozens of countries. Hundreds of projects. And every single one came with the same problem: the software wasn't built for the people doing the work.

The tools were either enterprise platforms that cost hundreds per month and took weeks to learn, or consumer apps that couldn't handle the complexity of a real job site. The expensive ones were designed for procurement departments, not for the person standing in a trailer at 6am trying to figure out if their subs are on schedule.

There was nothing in between.

What Two Decades in the Field Actually Teaches You Managing construction for the federal government across four continents teaches you things a product team in Silicon Valley never learns. You learn that the best tool is the one someone actually uses. You learn that a contractor won't sit through a training video. You learn that if it takes more than two minutes to set up, it's already dead.

You also learn what matters and what doesn't. Nobody on a job site needs 200 features. They need five that work perfectly — project tracking, team communication, client updates, change orders, and reporting. Everything else is noise.

Building What We Wished We Had Project Proctor wasn't designed in a conference room. It was designed from two decades of knowing exactly what a contractor needs — and what gets in the way.

No training manuals. No onboarding calls. No enterprise sales process. Set up a project in 90 seconds, invite your subs and clients, and get to work. That's it.

We built it because after 20 years of using tools that didn't work, we knew exactly what would.

The Same Philosophy, A Different Industry The patterns we saw in construction — overpriced tools, disconnected users, software built by people who never used it — exist everywhere. Education was next.

Students are using AI to copy-paste their homework. Teachers have no visibility. Parents are locked out. The tools that exist are either built for school district procurement or they treat AI as a shortcut instead of a teaching tool.

hybrED.ai takes the same approach we used in construction: start with the people doing the work — students, teachers, and parents — and build something that actually solves their problem.

From Government Contracts to the App Store The jump from managing billion-dollar federal programs to building a $9.99/month app might seem like a strange pivot. It's not.

The skill set is the same — understand the user, define the problem, build the solution, deliver on time. The scale is different. The bureaucracy is gone. And for the first time, we get to build exactly what we want, exactly the way it should work.

What's Next Two products live. Both rated 5.0. Both growing. We're a small team based in Sarasota, Florida with a development crew that spans the globe — and we're just getting started.

If you're in construction or education and your current tools aren't cutting it, we'd love to hear about it. That's how every feature we've ever built got started — with someone telling us what's broken.