Transcript Disclaimer:
This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability. Filler words and minor repetitions were removed, and formatting was adjusted to improve flow. The substance and intent of the conversation remains unchanged.
Henry Harrison: Today we’re fortunate to have an entrepreneur on the Henry Harrison Podcast—Entrepreneurs and Finance. We have Jack Carrere, founder and owner of Prokeep. He’s launching a new product, and we’re glad to have him here. Welcome to the show, Jack.
Jack Carrere: Hello, Henry. Thanks for having me.
Henry Harrison: Let’s start with where you are right now. You’ve built a sizable organization—over 100 employees and contractors. You serve a large number of distributors, you’ve been doing this for about 10 years, and you’re launching a new product. Tell us what Prokeep does and what you’re doing now that’s new.
Jack Carrere: We launched Prokeep a little over 10 years ago, which still feels crazy to say. It’s been an evolution.
We have just over 100 employees spread across a couple hubs. Our headquarters is in New Orleans. We also have a hub in Portland, Oregon, plus a lot of remote “Prokeepers,” as we call them.
We serve just over 1,000 distributors. We have over 40,000 active users who interface with over 3 million contractors.
If you’ve ever walked into a distributor, there’s usually a retail area and then a counter or inside sales crew. We help them organize their day. They’re hit with orders coming from many channels—email, text message, and believe it or not, still fax.
We unify those into a central inbox to make their workflow easier and help them miss fewer orders. We also help them be more proactive.
A typical user is asked for product recommendations or help troubleshooting equipment—water heaters, HVAC units, and more. They’re good at that, but there’s also an opportunity for them to go outbound with messages that matter for their distributor or brand. We make that easier.
The new product we’re launching is focused on making counter teams more proactive and more efficient. We’re calling it our Order Engine. We launched it a couple of weeks ago in Austin, Texas, and we’ve had a really good response from the market so far.
Henry Harrison: Tell us about that response. This is very fresh.
Jack Carrere: It’s brand new—just a couple weeks ago.
The innovation is taking all these disparate things happening at the counter and bringing them together. There’s technology we take for granted in other industries—CRMs, marketing tools, systems that show where a prospect is in a buying journey. Those tools are sophisticated.
But when you walk into a distributor environment, it’s not ideal for technology and workflows like HubSpot or Salesforce. Phone systems and CRMs don’t translate well.
So we’ve taken what we’ve learned and built workflows specific to distributors into our platform. We keep it simple because our customers are busy. They’re taking calls, checking inventory in the warehouse, and trying to keep up with new products and requests.
Our goal is to be the “easy button” that brings those workflows together. With Order Engine, we’re starting to see our vision come together—being the front-of-house system for distributors.
Henry Harrison: Talk about challenges you’ve had to overcome. In my experience, the entrepreneur path is rarely straight.
Jack Carrere: One big moment: we were a customer of Silicon Valley Bank, so when that bank went under, we had to act quickly and figure it out. Thankfully, that worked out.
COVID was another major moment. We were a much smaller company then—around 20 employees and a fraction of the customers we have today.
At that time, stores were closing, walk-ins weren’t happening, and many distributor counters and showrooms shut down. But home services and construction had to keep going. HVAC systems still break. Someone still needs parts and repairs.
That moment created opportunity for us because Prokeep facilitates communication between distributors and contractors. Contractors could call, but wait times might be 20–30 minutes. We gave distributors a way for contractors to text into a branch. You can answer multiple text threads at once, versus one phone call at a time.
We were a relief valve for the industry at a stressful time. At the same time, we were also learning how to run the company remotely.
Those are the moments where you have to think on your feet. The path isn’t always what you planned, but you figure it out. It was stressful, but rewarding, because we were solving a real problem.
Henry Harrison: What’s your competition? For some companies it’s the notepad or the sticky note.
Jack Carrere: For us, it’s sticky notes. You walk into some counters and they’re everywhere.
More seriously, our competition is the fragmented way people communicate: phone, email, personal devices for texting, sticky notes. Those work in their own way.
The innovation we bring is consolidating those scattered channels into a single pane of glass—a unified inbox.
That creates efficiency. It allows a counter team to route work to whoever is available, rather than overwhelming the most tenured person. It helps younger team members learn and contribute.
It also helps build what we call the “collective intelligence” of an organization—taking knowledge that used to live in individual heads and turning it into a system of record.
With Order Engine, we also interact with a customer’s backend system—the ERP. When an order comes in, the system can match it to product availability and generate a quote. That reduces re-keying and speeds response times.
Getting back to a contractor quickly often means winning the order.
Henry Harrison: Is there a target customer size, or can this work from small teams to very large organizations?
Jack Carrere: Early on, you’ll work with anybody. One of our first customers was a local distributor near New Orleans. I could go in every day, sit there, learn, and build faster.
As the product proves value, you start getting calls from larger organizations. We’re fortunate to work with some of the biggest distributors now—Ferguson, ABC Supply, PoolCorp, and others.
Working with large organizations is different. We’ve had to evolve the product and implementation processes to support them.
But the product scales well, whether you have one or two locations or a thousand.
Henry Harrison: You went to Brown and studied engineering. Was that always your path?
Jack Carrere: Brown was the best school I got into, so that helped.
People don’t always realize this, but Brown’s largest major collectively is engineering. I’ve always been a math and science person. I studied mechanical engineering—cars and motors were a big hook for me.
Right after college, I went into business consulting. One of my first clients was BNSF, helping design more efficient cargo routes.
Engineering gave me a framework for breaking big problems into smaller parts and solving them with a team. I don’t remember calculus anymore, but the problem-solving approach has stuck.
Henry Harrison: AI is changing everything. How is it affecting you?
Jack Carrere: It’s a major accelerant, both internally and inside the product.
Within the platform, we have a lot of data—over 80 million messages that have moved between distributors and contractors. That helps us understand what’s important to the market and how people respond.
For example, if a manufacturer wants to run a promotion, we can suggest the right audience and even message timing to optimize response rates, based on the data we see across Prokeep.
It’s powerful because customers are busy. They may not know how to run targeted outreach, but we can give them the pathway and the template.
And the foundational models are improving fast. That will keep making these capabilities more useful.
Henry Harrison: When did you decide to raise venture capital, and what is it enabling you to do?
Jack Carrere: We bootstrapped for years. We focused on product innovation, listening to customers, and evolving with their needs.
In 2022 and again in 2024, we saw a chance to double down on the vision: becoming the front-of-house system for distributors. To do that, we needed to invest more heavily in product and engineering.
A lot of the result of those investments culminated in launching Order Engine.
Inside sales teams are often reactive—taking inbound orders. It’s hard to suddenly ask them to become proactive. We designed this to help them stay reactive inside the platform, while the system prompts proactive outreach in a natural way.
If you can help inside sales teams get even one or two more orders per week, that moves the needle. And in a moment where there’s uncertainty in the market, relationships matter. We help activate those relationships without being annoying or disruptive.
Henry Harrison: Who are the firms backing you?
Jack Carrere: Our seed round was led by Iron Spring Ventures out of Austin, Texas, with participation from S3 Ventures, also out of Austin.
Our Series A was led by Dalia Equity out of San Francisco.
Henry Harrison: Did you celebrate? You’re in New Orleans.
Jack Carrere: Probably a little bit of both—some celebration, and then you realize the pressure is on.
For the seed round, it was during Mardi Gras. I remember signing final docs on my phone, but I couldn’t get cell coverage and had to run home to finish it.
Henry Harrison: I rode on the Harry Connick Jr. float. I think that’s Orpheus.
Jack Carrere: That’s right—Orpheus. That’s a great organization.
Henry Harrison: Anything you want to wrap up with?
Jack Carrere: This has been a lot of fun.
If I bring it back to the “why,” I’d encourage entrepreneurs to look for industries where there’s a gap in how technology is perceived or used. In our case, home services and distribution.
You can have an outsize impact, but it’s not always the first idea that works. It might be the third or fourth—or in our case, the twentieth. Hopefully others can get there faster, but the key is to keep learning and iterating.
Henry Harrison: Well done on continuing to learn, growing your company, and helping your customers. Great conversation. Thank you.
Jack Carrere: Thanks, Henry.
Henry Harrison: Okay.
