A sole trader with his hands under a sink cannot answer the phone. The caller waits twenty seconds, hangs up, and rings the next name on the list. By six o'clock there is a missed call on the screen and no way of knowing what it was worth.

When researchers actually rang 142 UK small businesses, 47% of calls went unanswered. Every one of those had already been paid for — Google, Checkatrade, the van wrap. The cost is incurred at the point the phone rings, not at the point it is answered.

The existing answer is a receptionist service or a voicemail box. Both fail for the same reason: the customer has to want to leave a message, and most of them just ring the next number.

The whole product had to fit around a constraint we refused to break: the number does not change. The number on the van, the cards and the Google listing stays exactly as it is. It runs on call forwarding already built into the network — three codes into the handset to switch it on, one to switch it off.

After twenty seconds unanswered, the caller hears eight seconds in the trader's own voice — not a robot, not a beep — telling them a text is coming. The text arrives with a link to a page carrying his name.

The page is cards, not a form: six job types, two follow-up questions each, and every question is one whose answer changes the price. A photo, a postcode, and a free-text box for the things that don't fit — no parking on the street, back gate's locked, they're out till five.

His number sits as a button at the top of that page the whole time. Anyone who would rather just ring, rings. The form is only ever for the ones who were about to give up.

The product isn't 'you missed a call'. It's a job he can price without getting in the van — which is an hour back on every job it saves.

The tone of voice does a lot of the work. This is a market that has been sold to badly for years, so the copy refuses the usual moves: no dashboard language, no growth claims, no annual plan to be talked into. £89 a month is the whole number. First month free with no card taken, so there is nothing to cancel and nothing to forget about.

The pricing section doesn't argue the value — it hands the customer the sum and lets him do it himself: divide what you spend a month on advertising by the calls it brought you, then count the ones you couldn't get to this week.

Setup is in person. We drive out, set it up on his phone, record the greeting in his voice, and ring his own number from the driveway to prove it works before leaving. That is a deliberate cost — it is also the entire trust proposition in a category full of software nobody installs.

Live at sendthejob.co.uk, serving Oldham and Greater Manchester. Next.js on Vercel, Supabase, Twilio.

£89 a month rolling, no notice period, £149 joining fee only if the customer stays past the free month.

It is also the second time we have designed this problem. Sitewise, in 2020, compressed a contractor's ring-round into one broadcast and a set of yes/no replies. Same observation, six years apart, from the other end of the phone.