I will never forget this scene: my mother hunched over at her desktop, reams of files stacked precariously on her desk. My father sitting across on a wooden stool, his shoulders slumped. They were preparing to sue a client who was refusing to pay for completed work. A lawsuit seemed inevitable.

The warning signs were already there. Other contractors had warned them that this client was chao ka (臭脚), smelly feet, dodgy. Three or four weeks into the project, when hacking had just started, one of my father's other clients found out who he was working for. He pulled my father aside, and said, “They are not like you and me”.

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My mother grew paranoid. For months, she had my father bring a voice recorder to document all their conversations. He was an old-school contractor: handshake deals, verbal promises, recording site progress on pen and paper. The client was a director at a large bank.

My father left school when he was fifteen. He had attended a Chinese medium school and communicates mostly in Mandarin and Hokkien. He managed to build a renovation company from scratch, running it together with my mother and uncle. But he wasn’t prepared for a client like that.

Over the next six months, I would return home and see my mother frazzled, my father resigned. Pouring hours into building a strong legal case, legal fees be damned. It was a matter of principle for them. My mother was understandably livid – how dare he sully my father’s good name. We had months of evidence, but not enough time to parse it. The legal process gave each side two weeks to respond to claims and counter-claims. I wanted to finish my homework and play with my friends; I was enlisted to help them, I was thirteen.

I spent hours helping them sort through the massive reams of data spread across various devices. Audio recordings had to be parsed separately; endless hours spent scrolling through messages. Digital camera reels plus photos snapped from my father’s mobile. My mother, ever the perfectionist, built up a thoroughly comprehensive database that made even her lawyer chuckle. Despite everything, she was restless, and worried – some days she would visit the temple along Bugis street, asking for protection and divination lots.

In the end, they won, decisively. They never even had to go to court. The judge ruled that it was obvious that my father had done the work, the clients had to pay my father what they owed. My parents won, but they still lost. Almost 80k in legal fees that could not be recouped, and more, in declined projects as they lacked the bandwidth. The client would then go on to badmouth my father to his friends, he lost half his clients that way, word of mouth is so important in the industry.

Later, we learned that this was not the first time the client had tried to pull this trick. His MO was the same: target small, subcontractors who looked like they have no clue how to handle bureaucracy, who are not good at ‘black and white’, who would be easily intimidated by legal fees, and would rather work for them for free than risk substantial losses.

I still think about that thirteen-year-old at the desktop sometimes, parsing recordings late into the night, constructing timelines from digital debris. She learned early that memory is unreliable, that good work isn’t enough, that documentation is a kind of armour. She also learned that having evidence somewhere in a pile of folders is almost the same as having no evidence at all.

The real problem wasn’t the documentation – my father had photos, recordings, messages. But documentation was always an afterthought. Finish tiling the bathroom, then remember to photograph it. Have a conversation about changes, then try to capture it somehow. And even when he did remember, what good was a photo of pipes? Which pipes? Where? Third floor or fourth? When you're fighting a claim about waterproofing, you need that specific photo of that specific pipe in that specific bathroom, not the three hundred other pipes you’ve documented. You need to prove sequence: this pipe, then this cement, then this tile. Space and time, married in evidence.

WhatsApp knows nothing about space. Your camera roll knows nothing about projects. The voice recorder knows nothing about rooms. There we were, a family of three, huddled over files and a desktop, building context from fragments. Matching timestamps to floor plans, voices to locations.

But what if documentation wasn’t a separate task, just part of doing the work itself? My father was already documenting everything – every WhatsApp photo, every voice note, every ‘OK boss, started already’ message. He just didn't know he was building evidence.

What if the system knew? What if you could ask: “Show me all waterproofing work in the third-floor bathrooms from March” and actually get it? Not because you meticulously labelled everything, but because the system already knew where you were when you took that photo, who was with you, what phase of work you were in.

The solution isn’t particularly revolutionary: capture everything, but more importantly, capture where everything is. Every WhatsApp message, every progress photo, every voice note, captured ambiently and anchored to exactly where it happened. Make retrieval surgical, not archaeological.

In the next piece, I'll explain our specific approach – why we built what we built, and how our assumptions differ from others in the space.