Hi there — I'm Joseph Chrasta, the founder and CEO of Trunkline. When I started this company in April 2017, my mission was to build an online community for the industrial sector to address a problem faced by every engineer, project manager, and vendor in the industry. This is the story of how I launched Trunkline to solve that problem.

In July 2012, I began a career in the energy industry as a mechanical engineer at a gas plant in Houston. I was responsible for installing new oil production equipment and gas compression facilities. Over the next few years, I built energy infrastructure in five different sectors, across 17 different states, with over 20 different companies.

The biggest part of my job, and the most difficult, was finding high-quality service companies and suppliers. There was no easy way to search for vendors, evaluate their capabilities, and connect with them easily online.

I wanted to search for something online like "gas compressors," and then instantly see all the gas compressor vendors along with various photos of their equipment so I could evaluate their work.

I searched for vendors on Google, but the information I found was inadequate. I searched for vendors through word-of-mouth, but that was too time consuming. I even searched for vendors by visiting them in person, but that became too expensive. I needed a faster, less expensive, more informative tool for finding vendors, and I was convinced the internet was the answer.

With some basic website development knowledge and a few hundred dollars of my own money, I launched Trunkline in April 2017. The idea was to provide an online platform where vendors could showcase photos of their products and services all in one place for customers like me to browse.

In the early days, I spent all of my time on web development and marketing. I built the first version of Trunkline using a website development platform called WordPress, and I started populating it with information from vendors who wanted to join the site. Over time, Trunkline's website became more advanced, and the network of vendors and customers on the site grew.

Now, over six years later, Trunkline is home to hundreds of service companies and suppliers showcasing photos of their work in the industrial sector. Our site is used by thousands of engineers, project managers, developers, and contractors as a tool to discover and connect with one another. Each week, as new users register on the site, the Trunkline network continues to expand throughout the industrial sector.

It's been an incredible journey so far, and I owe a big thanks to all our early adopters who saw the vision, joined Trunkline, and helped build the community. We are excited to continue building Trunkline into a powerful network for the industrial community and we invite you to join us as we grow.

To become a Trunkline member, you can visit our registration page here or you can contact me here to learn more. I look forward to hearing from you.

Founder & CEO