I’m Dillon Auxier. I live in St. Petersburg, where I design & code useful apps for the real world.
I’ve always loved to draw and build things. As a young child I would sit in my room drawing for hours. At age 6 I built my first computer with my mom (I think I mostly supervised, but she made me feel involved). From that point on, I was hooked by the allure of what was possible in the networked computer age.
I taught myself basic HTML in middle school when I wanted to redesign my MySpace page. It was exhilarating to know that I could make a change on my local machine and anyone in the world could see it. This was early in the web 2.0 era and my imagination had been captured by the seemingly limitless possibilities.
By the end of high school I was designing websites and web apps for fun on Photoshop. There was never really an end goal in mind, I just loved to do it. When college came around I started building small websites for friends to make a few extra bucks - teaching myself Javascript in the process.
In 2012, during my junior year of college, I built my first startup called Barspective - a marketplace of local bars that featured low-resolution live streams so patrons could see how busy it was before they went. While it did get traction, streaming costs and lack of business model ultimately bankrupted the company - teaching me a painful, important lesson.
Today, I’m the co-founder and CPO of Heave, an on-demand marketplace for heavy equipment service. I also founded Sumtech in 2020, a software studio based in St Petersburg, Florida. My focus and mission continues to be building useful applications that solve real world problems.