BuildDuh

The question

Why does quoting eat the evening?

A builder can price a job in their head standing in the customer's kitchen. Turning that into a written quote is the part that eats the evening, typed up from memory at the kitchen table, days after the visit. And late quotes lose jobs, because the customer has usually said yes to whoever came back first. So the question became, what if you could just say the job out loud?

The itch

Voice felt like the right shape

Builders talk about work fluently. Nobody wants an app with forty form fields, and most quoting software seems built for an office manager that a one-man band doesn't have. So the whole thing fits how the trade actually operates. You describe the job the way you'd describe it to a mate, the app does the typing, the sums and the formatting, and you send the finished quote to your customer yourself, over WhatsApp or email, because the customer relationship stays the builder's, not the app's.

What happened

Finished, and standing at the gate

The app works. Speak the job, and about a minute later there's a full quote, broken into sections with the VAT handled, ready to send. Right now it's sitting where a lot of finished products sit, in Apple's review queue. It's been sent back more than once, each time for something different, a subscription wired up in a way Apple didn't like, a sentence in the description they read differently to me.

I talk about the last 30% a lot on this site, the stretch between a working thing and a shipped one. This page is what that stretch looks like from the inside, while it's still happening. I'll update it when we're through.