Codex has changed how Colin Knudsen is building the startup he co-founded, allowing him to turn customer conservations directly into demos, sales materials, and product specifications fast without pulling engineers away from their core work.
Colin helps lead Proaction, a five-person startup that helps companies manage fleets and field assets: cars, trucks, trailers, refrigerated box trucks, construction equipment, and other equipment that moves through daily operations. Proaction started in May 2024 and now supports tens of thousands of assets across dozens of customers. Colin is not an engineer, but Codex gave him the tools to code like one.
The first major shift for Colin came during a sales cycle with a large enterprise prospect evaluating 18 software vendors. Proaction had a good idea of what that customer needed, but he knew the existing product demo would not feel specific enough. Fleet operations are highly variable: one operation might run from a single location with two cleaners and a fleet manager, while another might scatter vehicles across parking lots around a city and dispatch cleaners by proximity. Colin and Proaction’s head of product used Codex to turn call transcripts and customer context into a tailored software experience for their prospect. It was not production software, but it looked and felt real enough for the customer to raise their expectations for software tools in general. That moved Proaction to the front of the pack.
Colin now builds customer demos in his own sandboxed environments with Codex. The sandbox mimics core Proaction workflows, but uses demo data, and lets prospects log into an experience shaped around their operation. In one demo, he can ask the customer how a road-service issue should be reported, who should be notified, and what information the driver should collect. Then he can then build the workflow live, just speaking into Codex. For forms, he can tell the system to create a driver issue report that asks for a license plate, asks whether there is a problem, prompts the driver to take a photo, asks whether the vehicle is operable, and stores the submission. The prospect watches the form appear, submits a test report, and sees the photo and data flow back into the dashboard.
For Proaction, Codex has made sales, product discovery, and engineering more tightly coupled. Colin can validate a workflow with the customer before asking engineers to build it, then hand over a feature card with transcripts, screenshots, and a working prototype. The engineering team still builds the secure production version, but with less ambiguity. Codex also helps Proaction create custom one-pagers, outreach links, and event materials that lets his small team punch above its weight.
Colin says the old fleet software world forced humans to serve as the API between disconnected tools, cost time and caused errors. Codex lets Proaction build around the way each operation actually works.
