Kevin Shenk
Founder & Lead Architect
We start with a conversation, then a systems assessment: how work moves through your business today, who does it, and where it gets stuck.
Technology that fits the way you work
Avunu is a technical consulting firm with one goal: to help you and your team enjoy your work more. We design, build, and support business systems on open-source platforms, tailored to the people who use them every day.
Developers
Systems builders
No account managers
Our story
We realized the biggest difference we could make wasn't a better website. It was a better system behind the business.
Avunu grew out of years of hands-on IT and web work in York, Pennsylvania. TODO: verify founding year (around 2020?). Before Avunu, our founder worked under an earlier brand, Nexdis, helping small businesses with IT, file sharing, email, and web projects. TODO: verify Nexdis dates and how we want to describe it.
Avunu started out building websites and hosting them on infrastructure we ran ourselves, including for other agencies. Along the way, our clients kept asking for more: a quote that flowed into an order, an order that flowed into production, and inventory and shipping that stayed in step.
Today most of our work is ERP-centric: connected business systems on ERPNext and Odoo for manufacturers, print and production shops, repair shops, distributors, and other growing businesses. We still build websites, and we still run infrastructure, but now they serve the system at the center.
We work with clients close to home and across the country, entirely remotely when that suits you best.
Our mission
Empower courageous businesses with tailored data systems.
It takes courage to look honestly at how your business runs and decide to change it. We meet that courage with systems that fit: built around your workflows, your people, and your data, rather than forcing your business into someone else's template.
Our visionAI makes us faster. It doesn't make us careless.
Tailoring that used to be out of reach, now within it.
We combine leading-edge, battle-tested open-source business platforms, chiefly ERPNext and Odoo, with agentic, AI-augmented development. The result is strong, seamless technology that fits each business, at a level of tailoring that used to be out of reach for small and mid-sized companies.
Every system we build is reviewed by people, backed by tests where it matters, and documented so someone else can maintain it.
What we value, and what we promise
Each of our values comes with specific commitments. These are promises you can hold us to.
Who the system touches3 groups
Owner“Numbers I trust”
Front office“No retyping”
Shop floor“Fewer taps”
We'll identify everyone who touches the system, from the owner to the shop floor, before we design anything.
We'll write down what each group needs, in their words, and design against that list.
We'll bring your team in as early and as often as we can, so the system they get is the system they asked for.
Your prioritiesRanked by you
1Quotes into orders
2Inventory that stays in step
3Report polish
We'll keep one list of your priorities, ranked by urgency and importance, from day one.
Every new request goes onto that list, and we work in the order you set.
We'll deliver the essentials as quickly as we can, and add polish where you ask for it.
We'll agree on how billing works before any work starts.
We'll give you a best-case and worst-case estimate for every project.
We'll tell you well in advance if a budget is running low, and your project portal shows hours against budget as the work happens.
We'll choose technologies that more than one vendor can support.
We'll make sure your data can move somewhere else if you ever want it to.
Once you've paid for the work, you own it: the code, the configuration, and the data.
TODO: Proposed fifth value. Adopt it in the internal Foundational Statements (and confirm the upstream-contribution promise) before launch.
We'll generalize reusable work and publish it under open licenses.
We'll contribute fixes back to the open-source projects we depend on.
We'll share what we learn in our public knowledge base, so you, or anyone you hire, can see how things work.
How we work
Every engagement is different, but most follow the same shape. Your project portal shows tasks and hours the whole way through.
Assess
Prioritize
Together we turn what we learned into a ranked list of priorities and a plan with best-case and worst-case estimates.
Build in steps
We deliver in small, working pieces, starting with the essentials. Your team sees real progress early and shapes what comes next.
Move in
We migrate your data, train your team, and switch over carefully, with a plan for the first days on the new system.
Support and grow
After launch, we keep the system healthy and keep improving it as your business changes.
The people behind Avunu
We're a small team of developers and systems builders who write production code, run the infrastructure ourselves, and talk directly with the people who use what we build. No layers of account managers.
Kevin Shenk · Founder & Lead Architect
Kevin founded Avunu to help growing businesses spend less time fighting their tools and more time doing work they enjoy. He designs the systems behind our client work, and still writes production code on most of them.
He also runs the infrastructure those systems live on, maintains Avunu's open-source NixOS packaging for Frappe, Odoo, and WordPress, and is the author of Jx, the open-source web framework that powers this website.
Focus areas
Let's talk.
If your team is tired of fighting its tools, we'd love to hear from you.