Chime Labs AI Platform

The problem

For a trades business the phone is the whole funnel. A missed call is a lost job, and a quote sent three days late is a job someone else has already done. Chime Labs answers that with an AI receptionist — every inbound call picked up, qualified, and booked straight into the tools the business already runs.

The product worked. Reaching it was the problem.

To switch the receptionist on, a tradie has to forward their existing business number to a new one. That means either ringing their carrier to set conditional forwarding, or finding it themselves in phone settings — and the steps change with the carrier, the operating system and the handset. There is no single set of instructions that covers it.

So the hardest step in the product sat at the very front of onboarding, before a single call had been answered. It asked the least technical audience in the market to do the most technical thing in the system. Everything behind it — every feature, every integration — was worth nothing to a customer who stalled there.

And a second problem

Not enough people were arriving to get stuck. The product was under-exposed, and positioned for what it had been rather than what it had become.

Where I focused

Onboarding. Rebuilt the forwarding step around the branching reality rather than a single happy path — resolving carrier, operating system and handset for the customer instead of handing them the decision.

The foundation. The platform had been built fast to prove the problem, which was the right call at the time, but without a design system underneath it. That is affordable until you start shipping weekly, at which point it becomes the thing slowing you down. I put one in.

Routing and booking. A job calendar the receptionist books into live, while the caller is still on the phone. The tradie sets their day as a priority queue; the system finds a slot that works and steers towards days where the job sits near others already booked. Two jobs on opposite sides of the city is not a scheduling detail. It is an hour of unpaid driving.

Integrations. ServiceM8, ServiceTitan, Simpro and the rest. A tradie is not moving off the system they already run their business in, so the receptionist has to book into it.

Positioning and tiering. Repositioned the product and rebundled the features into tiers, then rebuilt the website to say so — design, build, brand and search — so the proposition was legible before anyone signed up.

Growth. A free quoting iOS app as a way in, with AI quote generation from voice: dictate after a site visit, review a drafted quote, send it. In customer development testing now.

Where it stands

Eight months in. Onboarding completion and booking usage are both up since the rebuild, and early feedback on the quoting app has been positive. The sample is still small and the product is still young, so I would rather say that plainly than put a multiple on it.

The measure that matters is completion at the forwarding step. It is instrumented and running. Ask me again in two quarters.