Tristan Schneider

I'm Tristan Schneider. Salvara is a studio I run that builds software companies.

I build because I tend to see two things at once: where a business is breaking, and the thing that would fix it. That's been true since long before I could write the software myself. Salvara is the structure I put around it — a place to build those fixes into real products and own them properly.

Not every product is the same kind of thing. Some are deep: a large problem, a road map that runs for years, an architecture that has to keep growing to serve it. Those I keep, because owning the direction across a product's whole life is the point — the decisions that matter most come after launch, not during the build. Others are simpler. Good products, worth building well, but not carrying a long arc. Those I'm glad to build to maturity and, if it makes sense, sell. Salvara exists to tell the difference and to hold the ones worth holding.

I came to this from the floor, not from a CS degree. I started a programming program in college and bounced off how it was taught. So I went to work — and the work was sales, for years, in every form it comes in: door-to-door at sixteen, retail, cold and warm calls. The longest stretch was at Concentrix as a bilingual OnStar advisor, where I ran every line of business in French — emergencies, stolen-vehicle, enrollments, the full range — then moved up to supervisor.

That's where the rest of this started. As an advisor, I built a tracker that showed each person their potential incentive for the month. Nobody asked me to; the whole department ended up using it. As a supervisor I did more of the same — dashboards and KPI insights that my team used every day for coaching and sales. I'd spent years inside companies large enough that the tools to succeed obviously existed, watching them sit just out of reach because the people designing how the company ran were too far from the desk to put them where they'd matter. The data was right there. The thoughtfulness to make it usable wasn't. That gap is most of what I build against.

Right now Salvara is developing its first products. The first is underway — I've started building — with the full build opening up as the infrastructure and funding come into place. It hasn't shipped yet, and I'd rather say that plainly than dress it up.

I also take on select advisory work.