QuoteReady

QuoteReady was my first real attempt at a startup. It started as an AI-generated idea that pointed out the theoretical quoting pain for tradies. Quoting was assumed to be a time-consuming process for tradies and was also assumed to have low conversion rates for leads due to unprofessional, messy quotes produced manually. Existing quoting software was by some standards considered expensive, and tradies operating in some areas were unable to utilise software due to poor internet connection. QuoteReady was built to solve all of these problems.

I started building QuoteReady in February 2026 as a Year 12 student and it was the first time I was truly exposed to the extraordinary capabilities of AI. Free to focus my attention wherever I wanted for the year thanks to my academic results the previous year, I was amazed how easily I could convert my thoughts into real software with AI. Any new feature I wanted to build, I could tell AI to do it for me and it would happen. Occasionally, I would run into errors, but I would just copy paste the error code and get AI to fix it, and things would go back to normal.

Finally, a month of casual building later, I was ready to launch QuoteReady. I had everything figured out. All the features were working, the website redesign looked really good and I knew that I was going to get it in front of my customers by going on tradie forums such as Reddit and Facebook and posting the advertisement for my customers. I thought that this would be a revolutionary build and any tradie that used it would get all their quoting troubles fixed. Things did not turn out how I expected.

The cold advertisements were met with indifference or hostility, particularly on Reddit. No one wanted to use it. Comments like 'kindly who's telling you to build this AI slop' and 'yeah nah' were on the tamer side of the feedback. Worse yet, hardly anyone had actually tried the product before giving it feedback. What I had been warned numerous times about but failed to act on was the core principle 'talk to your customers before you build'. I fell in love with building too much to the point where I neglected what my customers would actually want. To this day, it is the most salient lesson on building startups I have learnt, but I truly believe that most people have to go through this process before learning it. No matter how much I could tell you to follow this order, I believe most people would avoid talking to their customers before building the first time, resulting in inevitable failure.

In a last ditch attempt to save the startup, I dialled three tradies who had previously done jobs at my house before but I never spoke to them when they were at my house. Only one was interested in trying the product, to which no feedback was received as he said he didn't handle his own quoting. The other two avoided using the product at all. This was a true failure for founder-market fit. I tried selling a product to a customer base that I had no experience dealing with before and knew nothing about how they operated. This changed my perspective moving forward. The failure of this product led me to consulting, with the ultimate goal of learning the workflows and pain points of different industries so I would never make this mistake again the next time I launched a startup.

The product was fully self-funded. At this point I was happy to take a loss, so I auctioned the business and was lucky enough to be acquired at a price that made me significantly more than whole, despite being pre-revenue and having made many mistakes that usually would not yield positive results for the elective majority of founders.

This was the first chapter of my operations and I left with lifelong personal and business lessons as well as a surplus of cash that was reinvested into much better hardware and the API credits required to fund my R&D for takeoff research. I truly believe that most young people will benefit from spending money to invest in themselves. Taking the leap of buying that first $30 Cursor subscription to build QuoteReady was genuinely a life changing decision for me that meaningfully changed my trajectory and what I thought I was passionate about.