Dylan Amey

I did not come to this problem through a pitch deck. I came to it through my parents.

My dad built a pool maintenance business on the Gold Coast over twenty years. My mum ran the phone for it while raising us: fielding calls during the day, taking messages between school runs, then doing the books at night. She later started her own accounting practice. Both of them are exceptional at what they do. Both of them spent years losing jobs to missed calls, drowning in admin, and working evenings they should have had off.

As a kid I did not have language for it. I just knew the phone always won.

Conversations got cut short. Dinners got interrupted. My parents’ attention belonged to whoever was calling, and when they could not pick up, the guilt of the missed job carried into the rest of the day.

For a long time I assumed it was a dad problem. A mum problem. A my-family problem.

Then I became an accountant. At MQ Accountants I worked hands-on with close to a hundred solo operators and small trade businesses: plumbers, sparkies, pool techs, landscapers, cleaners. Later at KPMG I saw the other end of the spectrum, advising businesses turning over $100M and up.

The pattern made me feel sick, because it was not unique to my family at all. Every single tradie I worked with was losing jobs to a ringing phone they could not answer, and beating themselves up for it after hours.

The bigger the operation, the more systems protected the owner’s time. The smaller the business, the more the owner became the system.

Voicemail. A part-time receptionist they could not really afford. An overseas call centre that did not know a pool from a pump. None of it fixed the actual problem, which is that the call arrives while your hands are full and there is nobody to take it.

The data makes it visceral. Eighty percent of callers sent to voicemail hang up without leaving a message. Eighty-five percent never call back. Sixty-two percent have already called a competitor. Every one of those was a person who needed help and got nothing instead.

You did not lose that job because you were bad at your trade. You lost it because you were busy being great at it.

I started building Optiphone in early 2024, using my dad’s pool business as the very first test customer, because if it could not survive his calls it could not survive yours. In December 2025 I left KPMG to go all in.

Optiphone is my answer to a problem I felt before I understood it, and confirmed with my own eyes across dozens of businesses before I built a single line of it.

I am not a tech founder who spotted an industry to disrupt. I am a tradie’s kid who became an accountant and got tired of watching good operators lose to a phone.

The thing I noticed across those hundred businesses was not a plumbing problem. It was that in a small business the owner is the system. Every repeating conversation runs through one person, and when that person is busy, the conversation does not happen.

An unanswered call is only the most obvious example. The web enquiry that sits for four hours is the same failure. So is the registrant who never confirms, the customer nobody asks for feedback, and the invoice that goes quiet at six days over. All of them repeat. All of them leak. None of them are anyone’s actual job.

That is what Optiphone builds now. Not a receptionist. A way to make the conversations your business repeats run properly, every time, without depending on somebody remembering.