I'm a joiner by trade. Spent the best part of two decades on the tools before I started building software for people like us. And for about 18 months of that, I had a second job I never applied for — chasing my own unpaid invoices. Phoning clients at 8am, putting on the polite voice, asking politely for money they already owed me. Some strung me along for weeks. A few never paid at all. The worst bit wasn't the lost cash — it was the awkwardness. You've just finished a job, you're proud of the work, and now you've got to ring the customer and nag like you're a debt collector. It's knackering. And every other tradesman I knew was doing exactly the same thing — same phone calls, same excuses, same cash-flow hit on a Friday night when the wages went out.
One evening I sat down and thought: this is a solved problem dressed up in bad software. The big enterprise AR suites are great, but they're built for finance teams in big offices — they don't work for a sole trader with fourteen outstanding invoices and a van on the drive. So I built Paidly to be the tool I wished I'd had on the tools: AI that reads the reply, sends the next nudge, keeps the awkwardness out of your inbox, and lets you get back to the work you actually enjoy doing.
If you're a UK trade or construction SME — a sole trader, a subbie, a small outfit juggling a few jobs at once — that's exactly who this is for. It's not built for enterprise credit-control teams. It's built for you: the same person I was, ringing clients I didn't want to ring, just to get paid for work I'd already finished.
Rob Wylie — Paidly