I lost a £180 job. So I built the tool I wished I had.

The £180 conservatory

Last summer I was up a ladder on a Tuesday afternoon — terraced house in the Kalamaja district of Tallinn, four upstairs sashes and a conservatory at the back. My phone was in the van. I'd set it to silent because I'd been getting spam calls about asbestos surveys.

When I came down half an hour later, there was a missed call and a voicemail. Someone wanted a quote for a corner conservatory job, three streets across. Eight upper sashes, ten ground-floor windows, conservatory glazing top and side. By my rates: about £180.

I rang back within ninety seconds of finishing the job I was on. He'd already taken a quote from someone else — replied within five minutes of his original message — and booked. He wasn't cheaper than me. He wasn't closer. He was just faster.

The phone-tag tax

Once I started looking, I saw the same pattern everywhere. The contact form on my own website was converting at maybe one-in-five. People would fire it off, wait ten minutes, then text three of my competitors. Whoever replied first tended to win — even when their price was higher.

Speaking to other operators on the rounds I do alongside, the story was the same. Big jobs slipping through, not because of price, but because of timing. I started keeping a notebook. Over six months I worked out I was losing roughly two jobs a week to slow replies. At an average of £140 a job, that was £14,500 a year on the floor.

The detour

I'd done some software work before the round. Not full time — but enough to know that what I needed didn't exist. I wanted a tool that would read the property the moment a customer typed their address, give them a price based on my rates, and let them book. No phone tag. No spreadsheet. No interview.

I tried buying it. The big trade software (Jobber, Commusoft, Squeegee) all expected the operator to send the quote manually, and they all charged per-lead fees on top of the subscription. The chat-bot AI tools were the opposite problem — generic, untrained on rooflines, no understanding of how a Victorian terrace differs from a 1970s semi.

So I built it. Started in February. Got the first version live on my own site in May. Within six weeks the conversion rate on my contact form had jumped from 18% to 51%. The customer was doing the work I used to do over the phone — counting their windows, picking their property type, agreeing the price — without ever waiting for me to come down off a ladder.

Why this is built for the UK

The pricing engine is calibrated to British houses. Sash windows. Conservatories. Bay-fronted Edwardians. Tenement flats. The satellite reads UK roof angles. The site briefs flag access issues a UK round actually cares about — pole reach, moss on a fascia, a conservatory hidden behind a side return.

Every quote is in pounds. Every receipt is VAT-ready. The default settings are tuned to a British round, not a transatlantic one. Squeegify is not a globalised SaaS that happens to work in the UK. It's a UK-first product that I'm dogfooding myself, every week, on AknadPuhtaks rounds.

The plan

The first fifty operators lock their pricing for life and shape the roadmap. I'm running this lean — there's no investor pressure, no ten-person sales team, no scripted Slack onboarding. If you sign up I'll see your account in the dashboard and probably email you within an hour.

If the £149 / £299 / £599 a month doesn't pay back inside two weeks, you walk and you don't pay. That's the deal.

Cheers,
— Oruman