Why I built CallFundr.

I spent 25 years as an HVAC contractor in the Tampa area. Owner, tech, and everything in between. Two decisions in my first year changed the entire trajectory of my business.

The first: I hired an answering service to take my calls while I was in the field. $300 a month for daytime coverage. Within a year I pushed further — have them add the job, schedule a 2-hour window, and text it to me. I managed the day out of Google Calendar.

Then I added after-hours coverage. Another $400 a month. They'd load the call into the portal, it would auto-feed to the on-call tech, and every after-hours job was documented. No missing calls, no gray areas, no funny business. $700 a month total. And it was worth every penny — and this was 24 years ago.

The second decision: I found a software company willing to strip their 65-truck enterprise dispatch platform down to fit a small operator. They built me a web portal that loaded calls directly into a dispatch board. I assigned techs manually or let it auto-dispatch. The tech built the invoice in the field app, sent it back, the system tracked the payment and reconciled with QuickBooks.

It cost me $5,000 to build plus $1,000 a year for support — 24 years ago. It paid for itself in a single season and saved me that much every year after.

We went back and forth plenty. But we both realized what a lucrative partnership we had. All his other clients were in corporate IT — conference rooms, not job sites. I was actually in the field testing the product. Every edge case, every "this doesn't work the way a real tech works" moment came from me. That feedback made the platform better for everyone.

That's the lesson I carried into AI. You don't build the best product by trying to make it useful to everybody. You start with a specific user, understand the operating environment and the problems they actually run into, and build around those problems.

That's what I did with CallFundr. I didn't set out to build another general-purpose AI receptionist — there are already good products that answer the phone and take a message. I built CallFundr around the problems I spent 25 years watching HVAC companies deal with, especially when the shop gets slammed and the normal workflow starts breaking down. And I knew better than to assume every contractor solves those problems the way I did. Every shop is different — so CallFundr had to be built to adapt.

Those two moves — a smart front end and a connected back end — saved me hundreds of thousands in admin costs over the years.

Now I'm retired. And with the advantage of AI, I decided to build the version I always wanted — one where everything is connected from the start, and built by someone who's actually lived it.