Built on the wrong side of the auction — on purpose.

I run MNR Equipment out of Fraser, Michigan. We buy and sell used processing and laboratory equipment — extraction systems, chillers, reactors, packaging lines — the kind of machinery that's expensive to own, expensive to move, and surprisingly hard to describe well.

A lot of that equipment moves through auction. Which means I've spent a long time on the consignor's side of the table: filling out catalog spreadsheets, chasing down model numbers, taking photos in a warehouse at the end of a long day, and then sitting on my phone during a timed sale trying to figure out whether to hold a reserve or let a machine go.

The frustrating part was never the auction. Auctions work. The frustrating part was everything around it — the spreadsheet that only one person understood, the buyer question that got answered over the phone and then lost, the reserve change that had to reach an auctioneer running a hundred and fifty lots on a staggered timer.

So I started building tools for my own sales. A scanner that pulled a live catalog and tracked every bid against my reserves. A monitor that showed which lots had cleared and what the day was actually worth. Then the auction company saw it and wanted the same visibility on their side. Then the consignors wanted to see their own lots.

That's AuctionRoster. It isn't a theory about how auctions should work. It's the set of tools I needed to stop losing money on good machines with bad listings.