Why we built it
This one didn't start as a client brief. It started as a pattern. Talking to trade business owners week after week, the same problem kept coming up: when you're up a ladder or under a house, you can't answer the phone. And in the trades, an unanswered call rarely waits for you. The customer just rings the next number on Google, and that job is gone.
Most of the tradies we spoke to were losing work this way every single week. So instead of watching the problem keep repeating, we built the fix ourselves.
What we built
TradieCall is a full SaaS product: an AI receptionist that answers a trade business's phone 24/7 with a natural, local-sounding voice. No number porting, no new hardware. Calls simply forward to TradieCall when the owner can't pick up.
On every call, the AI does what a great receptionist would:
- Captures the job. Caller's name, number, address, what they need and how urgent it is, sent straight to the tradie by SMS and email.
- Flags emergencies. A burst pipe at 2am gets treated differently from a quote request that can wait until Monday.
- Filters the junk. Spam and robocalls never reach the owner's phone.
- Keeps a record. Every call lands in a clean dashboard with transcripts and recordings, so nothing relies on memory or a scribbled note on a timber offcut.
It also connects to the tools tradies already run their week from, including Google Calendar, Tradify and ServiceM8.
The result
A missed call is no longer a lost job. The phone gets answered every time, the details arrive as a tidy job summary, and the tradie stays on the tools. TradieCall now runs as its own subscription product for trade businesses across New Zealand, with plans from $129/month and a free trial.
It's the same thinking we bring to client work: find the thing actually costing the business money, then build the simplest product that fixes it.