I work for a business that manages apartments and motels for investors. We have always had trouble managing our maintenance staff.

All of the software we’ve found is too complicated. We don’t need a full on CMS, which most solutions are trying to be. And we’ve tried to use several of the complicated CMS-style solutions. We can’t simplify them enough to make them useful. They have too many bells, whistles, and other distractions.

We’ve also used paper work orders, which get lost, duplicated and just don’t give us a good picture of what’s really going on at each property. Sometimes an on-site manager would have the staff do a bunch of work, and then fill out the work orders afterward.

What I  is a repository that can be checked at anytime by myself, another of the managers, or the maintenance staff. It needs to be easy to understand or it’s not going to get used.

That is why I’m building WorkMelon.