Chime Labs AI Platform

Product and design lead · Chime Labs, Sydney · December 2025 – present

The problem

Chime Labs answers the phone for trades businesses. An AI receptionist picks up every call, works out what the customer needs and books the job into the system the business already runs. For a tradie, a missed call is a lost job, so the idea landed straight away.

When I joined, the product worked, but it was very much a functional startup, and getting customers into it was the hard part. Onboarding asked for a credit card, then asked the tradie to forward their business number to an AI they had never heard speak. Two acts of trust, both asked for before a single call had been answered. Most people stopped there.

The customers who did sign up nearly always had a salesperson with them — someone who walked them through it and played them a call. Once they had heard the agent answer as their own business, they were happy to go ahead.

What I did

• Worked directly with the founders as the only designer, mostly the Chief Product Officer and the Head of Engineering, on where the product fit the market and which problems were worth solving first.
• Spent time with existing customers to understand how they run their day, and studied the tools they already used to find the gaps an AI-first product could fill.
• Split onboarding in two. Getting in now takes an account and nothing else — no credit card. Then the product does what the salesperson used to do: pick a voice, hear the agent say your business name, and forward your number when you are ready.
• Rebuilt call forwarding so the product works out the carrier and phone for the customer and hands them one code to dial.
• Designed the job calendar the receptionist books into while the caller is still on the line, keeping a tradie's jobs close together rather than across the city, and connected it to ServiceM8, ServiceTitan and Simpro.
• Designed a quoting app for iOS, now on the App Store, that turns a voice note from a site visit into a drafted quote.
• Set up the design system, and did the brand and creative work, including the ad campaigns and explainer videos.

Where it landed

Many more people now finish onboarding. That moved the problem rather than removing it: the card and the forwarding still had to happen, so now the product has to earn them instead of asking at the door.

Then quoting and job management widened what Chime was for, and an onboarding built to sell one thing had to be rebuilt to carry three. That is the job at a startup. The work is right for as long as the product stands still, and then you do it again.