I never set out to get into the commercial glass business.
In fact, I had never really considered glass.
Like most people, I drove past glass companies all the time without giving them much thought. Storefront glass. Glass doors. Office entrances. Curtain wall. Broken windows. It’s everywhere.
But I wasn’t thinking about it as a business category.
Then I got a client who was interested in commercial storefront glass.
That changed everything.
We started working on developing his business throughout Las Vegas.
At first, I was looking at it the same way I would look at almost any contractor marketing problem.
But the deeper I got into commercial glass, the more interesting the industry became.
There was a distinction I hadn’t really thought about before.
A homeowner with a broken window is one customer.
A facility manager with a broken storefront door at a retail location is an entirely different customer.
So is a general contractor looking for a glazing contractor for a tenant improvement.
We started developing the Las Vegas market.
As I worked with the client, I started learning the terminology.
I started understanding what the customers were actually looking for and, just as importantly, what kinds of jobs a commercial glass contractor actually wanted.
And then I started looking outside Las Vegas.
That’s when the idea got much bigger.
This is a pattern with me.
I’ll start trying to solve one problem and eventually ask:
If the system works in Las Vegas, why couldn’t it work in Denver?
Once I started looking at those markets, I realized the underlying problem was basically the same everywhere.
Commercial customers needed glass contractors.
Good commercial glass contractors needed better ways to reach those customers.
Companies that did commercial work but didn’t explain it very well online.
And mixed into all of that were legitimate commercial glazing contractors who actually knew how to do the work.
That’s where the idea for Commercial Storefront Glass started taking shape.
This was the important distinction.
I wasn’t interested in building another local website that said:
and then duplicating it in another city.
I started thinking about the bigger system.
What if there was one platform built specifically around commercial glass?
That became the idea behind CommercialStorefrontGlass.com.
Build a national platform around commercial glass and then organize it around how commercial customers actually search for help.
And then we could develop relationships with qualified commercial glass contractors in individual territories.
Instead of trying to turn one contractor into a national company, we could build the national infrastructure and connect the right contractor to the right market.
That’s a completely different model.
Instead of asking:
I started asking:
That’s a much more interesting question.
Because commercial construction doesn’t fit neatly inside city limits.
The San Francisco Bay Area alone can be broken into multiple distinct territories.
The same thing happens in Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, Dallas and practically every major metropolitan area.
Once you start looking at it this way, you’re not really building pages anymore.
This was another lesson.
“Commercial glass contractor” is too broad.
One contractor may be excellent at emergency storefront repair and service work.
Another may want $20,000 tenant-improvement projects.
Another has the manpower and experience for major glazing packages.
Those aren’t necessarily the same company.
So I started thinking about contractors in tiers.
Broken storefront glass, doors, immediate repairs and smaller commercial projects.
Larger storefront systems, office build-outs, retail TI and projects requiring more estimating and coordination.
Curtain wall, large construction projects and substantial commercial glazing packages.
Now the platform wasn’t simply matching a city with a glass company.
It could eventually match:
That is much closer to how the real world works.
This is where the timing gets interesting.
I don’t think I would have approached this project the same way several years ago.
What it does is make it possible for a very small operation to organize an enormous amount of information.
That’s what interests me.
I’m not interested in using AI to write another generic article about storefront glass.
I’m interested in whether AI can help build and operate an entire commercial glass intelligence system.
That’s a much bigger experiment.
The website started with search because search gives us something extremely valuable:
If somebody searches for a commercial glass contractor because a storefront was just damaged, that’s intent.
If a general contractor searches for commercial glazing for a tenant improvement, that’s intent.
If someone is researching storefront replacement, that’s intent.
But search is only one part of the system.
The bigger opportunity is connecting:
with
with
with
with
That’s where I think this eventually goes.
This isn’t one of those case studies where I pretend I knew exactly what I was building from day one.
And eventually the question stopped being:
The question became:
I’m still answering that question.
That’s what makes the project interesting.
There’s also a business lesson here that has almost nothing to do with glass.
You don’t always find opportunities because you sat down and decided to “find an opportunity.”
Eventually the little problem you started solving looks completely different.
That’s basically what happened here.
Then I started building.
And once I started building, I saw the machine.
That’s how Commercial Storefront Glass went from helping one contractor in Las Vegas to an experiment in building a national commercial glass search and intelligence platform.
And we’re nowhere near finished.
Building systems. Testing ideas. Creating what’s next.
© 2026 Keith Sundstrom. All rights reserved.