Built by a tradie. For tradies.

Ten years on the tools

I spent ten years in Australia as a plasterer and renderer. Mostly residential. Some commercial. Big crews, small crews, solo days when the apprentice didn't show. The work was good. The lifestyle was hard.

The bit that ground me down wasn't the physical work — it was everything that happened around it. The quote pad on the dash of the ute. The voicemails I'd find at 6pm when I'd already been on tools for ten hours. The Sunday nights spent typing invoices instead of being with the family.

I always thought there'd be software for tradies. There was — but it wasn't built by people who'd ever held a trowel. The apps assumed you had time at a desk. They assumed you'd remember to log every job. They assumed you'd never miss a call. They were wrong about all of it.

Why TradieFlow came first

The first thing I built was TradieFlow. Voice-to-invoice. You finish the job, talk into your phone, and an invoice comes out the other end — synced to Xero, ready to send, with a Stripe link the customer can pay on the spot.

It solved the Sunday-night problem. The kitchen-table problem. The "I'll send the invoice tomorrow" that turns into "I forgot, where did that customer go?" problem. It works.

Then I noticed the bigger leak

The thing about fast invoicing is — it only helps for jobs you actually got. And the more I talked to other tradies, the more I realised the bigger leak was upstream. Calls were dying in voicemail. Customers were calling the next bloke on Google. The job never made it onto anyone's books.

Hiring a receptionist isn't realistic for a solo sparkie or a two-man plumbing crew. Fifty-five grand a year, plus super, plus you've got to manage them. Voicemail doesn't book work. Call diversion to your wife's phone isn't a business plan.

So I built Aenigma — an AI receptionist that picks up every call, captures the job details, books the work, and texts you the summary. Day, night, weekend, public holiday. Same greeting, every time.

What this is, what it isn't

Aenigma is not a gimmick. It's not a chatbot. It's not "AI" sprinkled on a phone tree. It's a working receptionist that sounds natural, asks the right questions for your trade, and books the job into your calendar without you ever picking up the phone.

It's also not magic. We set it up for you. Free. We learn what you do, who your customers are, what you want asked. Then it runs. You go back to the tools.

The two together

Aenigma answers the call and books the job. TradieFlow turns it into a paid invoice the moment the work's done. Two halves of the same problem — your time is worth more than the office work that surrounds the actual job.

If you're a tradie reading this and thinking "yeah, but my situation is different" — it probably isn't. Email me. bigcheese@indomustrading.com. Tell me what you do and what's bleeding out of your week. I read every one.

— Sam, founder, Aenigma AI & TradieFlow