I run vote.direct, a voting platform for HOAs, churches, nonprofits and unions. I’m a solo founder, bootstrapped, and I built most of it with AI. This months marks my first 5 figure month an 8x growth from the last month. How I got here was through many many conversations, how I got them was with keeping an open door for my customers to call me.

I wanted to have as many customer conversations as possible so I put my work cell number on the homepage. It says call or text and a person picks up. That person is me.

It’s turned out to be one of the most important things I’ve done, and not for the reason I expected.

Most of my customers are volunteer board members. They run an election maybe once a year, the result can be challenged, and if it goes wrong it’s their name on it. The companies I compete with have been doing this a lot longer than I have. I can’t win on track record for now. I can answer the phone.

The calls changed how I build, too. People rarely call about features but sometimes they do and it helps. They call because they’re worried. What if half our owners don’t use email? Is this legal in our state? Who do I call if something breaks the night voting closes? A lot of the site exists now because someone asked me one of those questions on the phone.

Some of the largest communities I work with, over 1,200 homes, started as a phone call.

I expected it to eat my day. It hasn’t. Most people text, and nobody has abused it.

Building with AI made the product cheap to make. The hard part to find was a person who will pick up. My customers taught me that the human behind the product matters more than the product.

If you sell to people who aren’t technical and are afraid of getting it wrong, put your number on the page. Ten calls will teach you more than any dashboard. It also felt natural my previous tech career in roles like a sales engineer, QA and customer success really primed me to take these conversations and do something with them.