Fourteen years of someone else's Mondays

How it started

In 2012 a New Zealand trades business had a problem that will sound familiar: work came in by email, it got forwarded around, and whether a job happened depended on whether the right person had read the right message. They asked for something to fix it. What they got was the first version of this — a mailbox that turned requests into jobs, and a way to get those jobs in front of whoever was closest to them.

It was never a product. It was a working tool, shaped entirely by what a real week throws at a crew: the email with no subject line, the photo of a leak that needs to stay attached to the job, the customer who wants telling when someone is on the way.

How it kept going

Plumbing and trade companies have run their days on it ever since. Offices dispatch on it and technicians carry it in the van — which means every rough edge has had years of someone hitting it at 7am with a customer on hold. Very little software gets that kind of testing. Almost none of it survives it.

That is the part we would actually put money on: not that WorkOrders has the longest feature list, but that the things it does are the things working crews needed badly enough to keep using for over a decade.

Why the rebuild

The original was built on tools that were current in 2012, and it was showing. So Molehill Creations, in Wellington, has rebuilt it properly: a modern stack, real multi-tenancy, an AI layer that reads the incoming mail, and proper billing — without losing the one idea that made it work in the first place, which is that the crew claims the job rather than waiting to be given it.

We are a small New Zealand outfit. That is the trade you are making: no 24-hour call centre, and no chance of the product being sunset because it stopped fitting somebody's roadmap. When you email support, the person who reads it can change the software.