Route to market, thought out loud

Most firms keep this part in a spreadsheet nobody outside the building ever sees, and publish it only once it has hardened into a pricing page with a tick chart on it. We would rather write it down while it is still provisional, because the commercial thinking will change over the next few months and it is more useful to anybody reading if they can watch it change. Everything below is a working note. None of it is a price list.

The £25 test

The working numbers have been the same since the first day's thinking. Twenty-five pounds a month covers ten jobs with all the transcription included, fifty a month is the pro tier for heavier use, and past ten jobs you pay per job. There is a free tier to sign up on, enough to feel what the thing actually does before any money changes hands.

Those numbers have never been tested against a paying customer, and we are publishing them anyway because they are the working assumption and it is more honest to say so now than to quietly move them later. The price is the easy part regardless. The hard part is month two, when the novelty has gone and twenty-five pounds is one more direct debit on a list of them. That answer has to be arithmetic.

The receipt has to make the argument

So the app shows you a receipt each month. What it recovered and what it won you, priced, set against what it cost you. If that number clears £25 the subscription argues for itself, and if it does not, we would rather somebody cancelled than stayed quietly disappointed for another quarter.

Three things get counted. Invoice items recovered: billable work agreed out loud on site, captured because it was spoken, and put onto the invoice when it would otherwise have gone out unbilled. Trade-counter trips avoided: parts spotted in a voice note and ordered in time, so a delivery turns up instead of you driving across town mid-job, counted in hours and priced at your own rate. Leads and sales rescued: an enquiry qualified or a job chased because the app raised it while there was still time to do something about it.

The rule that makes the receipt worth anything is attribution honesty. A line only counts when the app demonstrably did or prompted the thing, and if we cannot point at the moment it caused the outcome, it does not go on the receipt. That rule will cost us numbers on every single statement we ever produce, which is exactly why it is worth having.

If we can't point at the moment it caused the money, it doesn't go on the receipt.

Where people will hear about it

The intention has been the same from the start: advertise where tradespeople actually watch things, rather than where business software usually advertises. Instagram is on that list. So is the trusted-tradesperson content that a great many people in the trade genuinely watch of an evening, made by people they already believe.

Then there is word of mouth on site, which for the trades is the strongest channel there is and the slowest to earn. A sparky who has been shown something useful in a van at eight in the morning has told the plumber by ten. Nothing wins that except the product being good, which is a large part of why the reliability work is getting the attention it is.

None of this is running. There is no advert, no budget and no agency. It is a plan on a page, written down here so that when we do start spending money we can be held to what we said we would do with it.

The onboarding is the marketing

There is no signup form. The first press of the button asks for the microphone and you are already capturing, because the button is the only thing on the screen and it fills the screen. The camera and the selfie come next, and the selfie is there for a plain commercial reason: it makes the reports that go out to your customers look like they came from a real firm.

Everything a system might reasonably want to know gets looked up or collected later. Company details from Companies House, the address of wherever you happen to be standing, the shape of your business built up from what you say over the following weeks. By the time somebody has technically signed up they have already done a piece of real work, and that is a far better argument than any landing page we could write, this one included.

Parked, and honestly parked

Two commercial ideas exist only as voice notes sitting untriaged at the bottom of an issue. Neither has been designed, costed or argued through, and we are listing them because a route to market containing only the confident parts is marketing rather than working notes.

Both will get worked up properly or dropped, and whichever happens will appear on this page with a date against it.

• £25 a month, ten jobs, transcription included.
• The receipt has to beat the subscription.
• If we can't attribute it, we don't claim it.
• The first press is the product. No forms.

Written on 27 July 2026, alongside what works today and what we mean by finished and earning the right to press send. The whole record is on the news page.

Read next