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u/aussieskier23

▲ 1 r/AustralianStartups+1 crossposts

Looking for beta testers — AI receptionist + invoicing mobile app for tradies

Hello all, I am in the final stages of Android / Play store submission (iOS takes longer) with my app Better Half https://getbetterhalf.com.au

Every tradie needs a better half. Someone to pick up the phone when they're up a ladder, send the quote that night, chase the invoice on Friday. For most of them, that's their actual partner — doing the books on a laptop at the kitchen table on a Sunday night.

The problem: solo tradies lose two or three jobs a week to missed calls — hands dirty, under a sink or up a ladder, customer rings the next bloke. Then they lose their Sundays to quoting and invoicing because Xero + Square + Calendly + voicemail is a tangled mess.

What we built: one app that does both halves.

  • AI receptionist answers missed calls, sounds like a real person, asks the right qualifying questions, and books the job straight into its calendar.
  • Same app sends the quote, sends the invoice with a payment link, or takes tap-to-pay on your phone (no second device, no Xero sub).

Who we are:

  • Me: ecommerce veteran — 14 years owning and managing an online business, cumulative sales in 8 figures. Marketer-operator, not a tech founder by trade.
  • My wife : 20 year digital marketing professional, agency and client-side, Head of Digital at the Melbourne office of a global agency. Customers in SaaS, FMCG, Auto, Beauty.
  • My brother-in-law: licensed builder, customer zero.

What we need from beta testers:

  • Solo tradies or service providers in Australia (sparkies, plumbers, builders, gardeners, cleaners, mobile mechanics, etc.)
  • Use it as your real business line
  • Tell us what works and what doesn't

What you get: free during beta, and 6 months free usage post-launch.

Fill out the form on https://getbetterhalf.com.au and we will be in touch with a beta invite.

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u/aussieskier23 — 4 days ago
▲ 91 r/espresso

There is nothing worse than coming out in the morning to a stone cold coffee machine because it has run out of water.

I had an attempt to make this device: https://www.reddit.com/r/espresso/comments/1duhi3b/opensource_release_of_my_vibrationactivated/

However I lacked the skills to solder tiny wires on to tiny solder pads directly on to a PCB so I parked the idea for a while. But after another cold machine morning, I put that repo in to Claude and asked if it could make something similar but without hardcore soldering and off it went.

It gave me a list of items to order which turned up in a few days and I got going. I used small cable joiners at the beginning just for testing but when I got it going, we had a working prototype very quickly I soldered it up.

We had a bit of a false start when it recommended a laser rangefinder, even though the above repo specced an ultrasonic sensor, mainly because I liked the sound of a laser haha. But it ultimately did not like reflecting off a dead still body of water inside a dark-ish tank especially at the middle distances of the tank.

But I was very encouraged & pivoted to an ultrasonic sensor, which you can see in one of the pics attached in serial through the laser - mainly because the 3M tape is extremely strong and I haven't bothered removing it yet. I figured out the point at which the water level shuts off the machine, made a mark on the side of the tank, conveniently it was 200mm from the brim, made marks at 15cm, 10cm and 5cm from the brim and used these to calibrate. The tank is a trapezoidal shape and I have not accounted for volume I am using distance as a proxy.

Now I know vibe coding is controversial around these parts, but it dawned on me that I had a programmable display with Bluetooth and Wifi, an Acaia Lunar Bluetooth scale, and a couple of always-on machines with docker.

So the next step was to build a full shot tracking telemetry app. As per the linked above repo it used the internal accelerometer for pump timing, but as I don't have the CAD skills to make a 3D printed mount (if this gets any traction I'd welcome someone to try this!) so I ordered a Piicodev accelerometer which just daisy chained to the bus, and went a bit mad tuning the pump on/pump off time to be as exact as I could get it.

The display unit live streams the shot, both on its internal screen but also to the server end that you can watch on your phone, pushes a full json of the shot raw data in case there are wireless hiccups mid shot and you can visualise/compare and export .shot format that is compatible with Coffee Visualizer etc.

So it's kind of overkill, but I enjoy projects like this, the repos are here:

https://github.com/richardross23/water-meter

https://github.com/richardross23/coffee-telemetry/

Note that it's kinda personalised to my use case, in particular I have not added support for other bluetooth scales like Decent, Bookoo etc. Again if this is popular contributions would be good.

Anyway I am very much enjoying the data, and hopefully will never have that sinking feeling again of a cold machine in the morning.

u/aussieskier23 — 18 days ago