Built by one plumber-business obsessive in Glasgow.

I rang four or five local plumbers. Every single one had "24/7 emergency callouts" written across their website or Facebook page. Every single one went straight to voicemail. I gave up on local after about twenty minutes and rang one of those UK-wide emergency firms - they said yes, they could send someone, but the nearest plumber was thirty miles away. I sat up half the night with buckets under the leak, with no actual idea whether anyone was coming.

To his credit, the bloke from the UK-wide firm did turn up about an hour later. And the "emergency fix"? Maybe two seconds. He tightened a single fitting, the water stopped, and that was it. He told me my gas provider would need to do the actual repair properly the next day (which they did - and apparently the gas provider doesn't do emergency callouts themselves, which is its own small absurdity). The job he came to do was barely a job at all.

The thing that stuck with me wasn't the leak. Leaks happen. It was the silence. Four or five missed calls, not a single text back. A two-sentence reply - "got your message, I'm 30 miles away, I'll be with you within the hour" - would have completely changed my night. The buckets still needed swapping until someone arrived, but the panic of not knowing whether anyone was even coming? That's the bit a text would have killed.

That's when it clicked. The plumbers I was ringing weren't bad at their jobs. They were on other callouts, or asleep, or already booked. The actual work, when someone eventually turned up, was a two-second tighten-and-go. The gap was earlier than that - between a stressed customer hitting "call" and a busy plumber being able to answer. A two-line text could have changed everything for both sides.

So the first thing I built was a triage system - a short form that sits on a plumber's website. Instead of hitting voicemail and giving up, the customer fills in four questions: is water actively flowing, have they found the stopcock, what's leaking, what's the postcode. The answers tell the plumber immediately whether this is a genuine drop-everything emergency or something that can wait until morning. True emergencies get flagged and confirmed. Everything else gets an honest ETA rather than silence. The customer knows help is coming. Nobody sits up with buckets not knowing.

That's the experience behind Plumber Pro AI. The triage system is still part of what we build. But the bigger problem I kept running into was plumbers losing work they never even knew existed - planning applications approved weeks before the homeowner Googles a plumber, landlord clients quietly cycling to whoever answers first at renewal time. That's what the rest of the tools are for.