"I wasn't trying to start a software company. I was trying to solve one problem for people I already worked with."
I spend most of my time in commercial real estate, managing properties and working closely with the contractors who keep them running, plumbers, electricians, handymen, the people who actually show up and do the work. Over time, those working relationships turned into real ones.
So I started asking them directly: what's actually costing you money? Where do you feel like you're leaving business on the table? The answer that came up more than any other was almost never about the work itself. It was about the phone. Calls missed mid-job, voicemails that never got returned, customers who just moved on to the next name on their list.
For one contractor I was close with, I built something simple to fix it: when a call went unanswered, the customer got an instant text letting them know their message was received and someone would follow up. No more silence, no more guessing whether anyone got it. He started keeping jobs he used to lose.
He told other contractors. They asked for the same thing. That's how CatchCall AI started, not as a product I set out to build, but as something contractors I trusted asked me for, because it solved a real problem they were dealing with every week. I still manage property day to day, but I'm building this alongside it, because the problem turned out to be much bigger than one contractor.