The Most Scammy DM: How Justin Ended Up on Within Tolerance

When Justin was just getting Toolpath off the ground, Justin sent a DM to Dylan Jackson from Prodium Machining. No profile picture. No context. Just a message from some random guy named “Justin Gray” saying he was working on something for machine shops. Dylan looked at it and thought, this has to be a scam.

But for whatever reason, he replied.

Fast forward a few years, and Justin just did a full episode on Within Tolerance — and it’s one of my favorite deep dives into how we think at Toolpath.

Justin doesn’t do many podcasts. He’s not a content guy, not big on social media (as he admits within the first two minutes of the episode), and definitely not into polishing up a story to make it sound better than it is. So this conversation with Dylan was a rare chance to hear him talk through how he approaches problems, what he’s learned from thousands of hours with machinists, and how Toolpath has evolved since we started building it.

A few things stood out to me:

1. Justin doesn’t just listen to machinists — he absorbs everything.

One of the best parts of the episode is when he talks about what it means to “listen to your customers.” Everyone says they do it. But Justin breaks down how we take feedback from shops and immediately bring it into the product. Not in a roadmap meeting 6 months later. Right away. And not filtered through sales or support — straight from the shop floor to code.

It’s part of why Toolpath feels like it was built by machinists, not just for them.

2. We didn’t start with a big product vision — we started with curiosity.

Justin tells the story of how Toolpath started not as some grand plan, but as a bunch of questions. He was doing consulting at the time, building tools for individual shops. And he kept seeing the same pain points over and over — tribal knowledge, missing data, clunky software, wasted time. Eventually, he thought: there’s got to be a better way to run a modern shop.

That curiosity turned into a prototype. The prototype turned into a product. And now Toolpath is running in some of the best shops in the country.

3. Toolpath isn’t just a product — it’s a mindset.

There’s a great moment where Dylan asks Justin what makes a modern machine shop actually work. And Justin’s answer isn’t about software, or automation, or some fancy new integration. It’s about how a team communicates. How information flows. Whether people are aligned and know what’s going on.

That’s the stuff we’re trying to enable with Toolpath. We’re not just replacing spreadsheets or tribal knowledge with software — we’re helping shops actually think more clearly.

The whole conversation is worth a listen. It’s funny, honest, and full of small moments where you realize just how deeply Justin understands this space.

Big thanks to Dylan for taking a chance on that original DM, and for creating a space where builders like Justin can share what they’ve learned.

🎧 Episode 233 – Justin Gray of Toolpath Labs

Listen here: Within Tolerance on Apple Podcasts