Chris Schrade

I did not start in software. I was an employee at A Quick Pick Crane Service who saw how things could run differently, and I made the most of my time there by building what did not exist: inventory tracking, electronic POs, safety and credential management, field data that flowed straight to the office, and a full estimating system. That is where I learned the lesson this whole company runs on: the person who lives the workflow knows what the software should be.

Over the past decade I have taken that lesson to over 100 startups, founders, and established businesses. Along the way I literally wrote the book on running software projects without a big team: NoCode Project Management, from the era when no-code was the fastest way to ship.

Then the economics changed. AI-assisted development on a modern stack now gets to real, owned, production software at a price small businesses can afford. So that is what I build today: full custom software on modern bones, shipped in releases you can see.

Too many projects fail before the first line of code, because nobody stopped to ask what actually needs to exist. That is why everything here starts with strategy first: the problem, what fixing it is worth, and only then the build.

Today Alchemy Apps does three things: I advise businesses on AI, I build custom software, and I ship my own apps. Each one makes the other two sharper.