Fourteen years of someone else's Mondays

How it started

In 2012 an electrical company 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 hand those jobs to whoever was closest to them.

It was never a product. It was one company's tool, and it was shaped entirely by what that company hit in a real week: the email with no subject line, the photo of a leak that needed to stay attached to the job, the customer who wanted telling when someone was on the way.

How it kept going

A plumbing firm picked it up and has run on it ever since. Their office dispatches on it and their 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 marketing 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 a working crew 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, proper billing — and a deliberate, byte-for-byte compatibility with the old system, so the crews already on it can come across without losing their history or relearning the app in their pocket.

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.