I did my apprenticeship under my uncle, a one-man-band sparky out of Lake Macquarie. He was a brilliant tradesman and an absolute shocker at the office bit. Quotes on the back of receipts. Invoices three months late. A voicemail that nobody checked. He retired with a hernia and not a lot to show for thirty years on the tools. That's not a unique story.
I went and worked in software for ten years after my ticket expired. Saw what other industries had — CRMs, AI receptionists, real automation — and watched the trades get sold the same generic dashboards over and over. None of it landed because the tradies it was built for don't have time to set anything up.
So in 2024 I started Tradie Tech with one rule: we do the setup. Not as a paid add-on. As the whole point. We sit down with you, build the website, configure the AI, write the quote templates, set up the Xero sync, and then we stay in your inbox for a month watching it work. You stay on the tools.
We're 14 people now, out of a converted boilermaker's shed in Wickham. About half of us have been on the tools. The other half learned to listen. Every new hire spends week one on a real customer's job site — that's how we keep the work honest.
The office chair is the wrong chair. Tradies don't get into the trades to do admin — they get into it to make things work, to build things, to fix things. Our job is to take everything that isn't that, and run it for them.
We didn't write a fifty-page brand bible. We wrote four sentences and check every product decision against them. Boring, repeatable, no surprises.
If a sentence doesn’t sound like a foreman with a coffee, we rewrite it. No "leverage". No SaaS voice.
Tradies open the app for a reason. The screen they land on shows that reason — nothing else.
AI isn’t a faceless system. It’s Trace. He has a profile, a history, and someone you can blame: us.
Every feature ships in shadow mode for a fortnight before we flip it live. Real calls. Real jobs.
We don't run roadmaps off hunches. Every shipped feature in Tradie Tech started as a problem someone described to us — phone in one hand, multimeter in the other, a leaking ceiling in the background.
— Trent, sparky. We shipped scheduled-send and auto-replies.
— Sarah, plumber. We shipped real two-way sync, not a CSV export.
— Dan, builder. We shipped live transcripts + push alerts.
Half a day in the Newcastle shed. We'll workshop your AI receptionist live and you'll leave with a working demo. No charge, no pressure.
