Combining Data Scraping with Grease Scraping: One Year of Grillyan and What’s Next with Urgify
How running a grill maintenance business gave me the missing piece to connect tech with service.
When I moved to the U.S. three years ago, and YES, I came as a legal immigrant from day one through an EB-1 visa, that is another long story. What mattered then was that I quickly realized I needed to build something on the ground alongside Hexact. It was not just a desire, it was an immediate need. I also saw how little I understood about the service market here. Later I learned that people call it home services, local services, field service, or skilled trades.
During that period I tried many different things, but nothing clicked. The bigger idea was always to connect technology and service, but first I needed real experience. After several failed attempts and months of research, we found a niche in Miami that is underestimated and growing: grill cleaning and maintenance. We launched last summer, and our first order came on August 27, my birthday. That coincidence makes it easy to remember, since I am bad with dates. In the same way, this will be the day I first speak about the next one.
In the beginning, it was just me and my partner. I’ve been a CEO for decades, but this was my first time doing hands-on work for money. The nights before our first jobs we were watching grill videos just to know what they even looked like. The first job took six hours with both of us working. Today, with the right process, tools, chemicals, and instructions, the same job takes two and a half hours for a single technician. Back then, we didn’t even know how service people got into gated communities or the right way to approach a customer’s backyard. At one point we managed to shut off the customer’s circuit breakers with our pressure washer. It was a disaster, but we got through it and learned more in one day than from any business plan on paper.
Now, Grillyan is a stable and growing business. The model is defined, we have full-time technician, steady customers, and a service that stands on its own.
Lessons Proven
Nothing here was a brand-new revelation. These are the same truths I’ve seen across every business, just shown again in a new context with their own small variations.
Customers buy trust. Basics matter most: answer the phone, show up on time, do the job right, leave the grill better than you found it. Don’t leave a mess, be polite, and charge fairly. That alone creates repeat business.
Ads bring sales, reputation builds growth. Google Ads got us started. Without them, there would have been no first jobs. But referrals from condos, HOAs, realtors, and neighbors are what keep the business alive. Reputation compounds in a way ads never will.
Say no when you should. Customers asked us to fix things outside our scope. We could have said yes for extra cash, but it would have cost focus and credibility. Staying clear on what we do best created more trust in the long run.
Scaling service is about people. Scaling software is about code. Scaling service is about technicians. Every worker represents the brand in someone’s backyard. That means training, oversight, and care. There is no shortcut.
Simple businesses are underrated. Nobody brags about cleaning grills. Yet it delivers steady work, grateful customers, and clear profit paths. It may not sound exciting, but it is real. And yes, you can earn more than driving Uber.
From data scraping to grease scraping
Most of my career has been about building and scaling businesses. I started with a web design agency, then POS and ERP software, then moved into food production and distribution, then a food delivery platform that operated in multiple countries. After that came data scraping and automation tools with Hexact, which I am still operating. Each step taught me something new about systems, scaling, and execution.
Food delivery brought me closer to the customer than software ever did. I sometimes did deliveries myself, but more often I sat in the call center during peak hours to handle customer complaints and feel the business from the inside, and my co-founders did the same. But it’s still not the same as ground-level service. Handing someone food at their door is quick and transactional. Stepping into someone’s backyard to clean or repair their grill puts you in their home environment for hours. You carry responsibility for their equipment, their property, and their trust.
Moving from data scraping to grease scraping changed how I see value. In software, food distribution, and even delivery, there is always some layer between you and the customer. In home services, there is no layer. You are face-to-face with the problem and judged instantly by the result.
By the way, during this period, when I was literally servicing multiple customers every day, and even today still actively involved in the business, just less in direct service - I actually managed to have more meetings with Hexact customers than ever before. When your day is packed and every minute counts, you stop wasting time. You realize you can do much more, not less. So when people say they don’t have enough time, it’s usually just BS.
That feedback loop is direct and unforgiving. It showed me why trust is everything, why reputation compounds faster than marketing, and why small details decide whether you are invited back or not. It is humbling, but it makes you sharper as a builder.
Looking Forward
Year one proved the idea works. Year two will be about expanding deeper into communities, partnering with more HOAs, and moving into new cities, then new states.
Grillyan was never only about grills. It was a way to learn how service really works in the U.S. and see how much of it can be improved. That experience brings me closer to the bigger idea: Urgify.
In my career I kept hitting walls or ceilings. Sometimes I just got bored. Sometimes the market shrank or shifted. Each time I searched for a market that feels endless, full of problems I’m excited to solve, and unlikely to disappear even as more of it gets automated. Services are exactly that. People always need something fixed, cleaned, or handled. The problems never end.
The core problem is urgency and trust. When something breaks or needs to be done today, there’s still no simple way to get help with one click, the way you order food or call a ride. AI will change how service work gets done, but the industry itself will not disappear because the demand is immediate, constant, and human.
Urgify is about combining what I learned in backyards with what I know from logistics, scaling delivery, and building software. The goal is clear: connect the realities of service with the efficiency of tech. Current AI technologies push this even further. They make what I am building more possible, faster to execute, and closer to reality than it would have been just a few years ago.
Grillyan gave, and still gives, me the missing piece of experience. Urgify is where I put it all together.