↳ Vol. 00 // The Mission
Why HOO exists.
Built between concrete jobs by a Kansas City dad who got tired of watching small shops pay $5,000 for sites that look like everyone else's.
Local shops are paying agency prices for template-stamped websites.
The roofer pays $4,800 for a site they don't understand. The barber gets billed $300/mo for "SEO" that's just a meta-tag report. The fence guy's "custom" build looks identical to the one across town because the agency used the same Wix template for both.
Meanwhile everyone on Google is using AI search now. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. If your site isn't built to be read by AI, you're invisible to half your customers and the agency that built it doesn't even know what AEO is.
— THE BUILDER
Kansas City, MO
Hi, I'm Matthew.
I built my first Shopify store at 2 a.m. between concrete jobs — NoReturn Apparel, a faith-driven streetwear brand, after my regular shift on highway crews. I taught myself Liquid, CSS, and AI tools the same way I learned to set forms: by getting it wrong until it worked.
I'm not an agency. I'm not a freelancer charging $150/hr. I'm one builder, in Kansas City, who knows what it costs a small shop to feed a family — and what a real website should actually do for that shop.
HOO is what I wish existed when I was the guy paying $5,000 for a site I couldn't even edit myself. $0 upfront, real code, live human, cancel any time.
"If I can't build you something you'd actually pay for, you don't owe me a thing. That's how I'd want it if it was my dad's shop on the other side of this site."
Local shops with real customers.
Roofers, fencers, painters, pressure washers, lawn care, junk removal. Phone-rings-once-and-the-job's-yours kind of work.
Auto detailing, barbers, pet grooming, cleaning, fitness, photography. Booking-driven, repeat-customer businesses.
Apparel, food trucks, coffee, anyone with a product who doesn't want to look like a Shopify template. Brand-first ecommerce.
Honest list — who I can't help.
Big agencies needing white-label work · Tech startups needing custom SaaS · Anyone selling regulated stuff (firearms, kratom, CBD, etc — Shopify rules I can't bend) · Anyone who thinks $175/mo is "expensive" for a hand-coded site that brings them work — that's not a fit, and I'll tell you straight before we waste each other's time.
Ready to see what yours could look like?
Free build, no card, no commitment. 15-min intake call, then I start coding.