Company
One person, one problem.
Bludge is built in Melbourne by Raef Akehurst. It exists because an inquiry that sits unanswered for a day is worth almost nothing, and everybody in a small business knows it and still cannot get to the phone in time.
The inquiry comes in at ten past seven on a weeknight. Whoever could answer it is on a roof, or at dinner, or asleep. By the time anyone rings back, the person has filled in three more forms and taken the first call that came.
That is the whole problem. It is not a marketing problem or a CRM problem. It is a five-second problem, and it needed something that picks up the phone at ten past seven and sounds like a person from around here.
So that is what this is: it rings the moment the inquiry lands, says it is an AI, asks the questions the owner would ask, answers from the owner's own notes, and puts a time in the calendar. The owner sets it up themselves, in about twenty minutes, without a developer.
About Raef
[founder bio: two sentences]
He answers the contact form himself, and he is the one on the walkthrough call.
What we hold to
Four things, and they decide the rest.
-
Speed is the product.
Five minutes decides whether a lead is reachable at all. Everything hard about this — the queue, the region, the pauses — is in service of getting to the phone first.
-
It says it is an AI.
First sentence, every call, in every voice. It isn't a setting, it can't be shortened, and no customer gets to turn it off. A business that needs to hide it should not be using this.
-
Listen close to the call.
Knowing when someone has finished a sentence is the whole trick, and it cannot be done well from the other side of the world. So the listening happens near the caller, not near us.
-
Compliant by default.
Calling hours, consent age and opt-out ship switched on. A customer can narrow them and cannot widen them. The rules are written down, in full, on their own page.
Where it runs
Built in Melbourne. Listening in Sydney.
The part that listens runs in Sydney today, and US calls are listened to from there. San Jose is the planned US region and is not running yet. We would rather tell you that than let you find it in a call.
The rest of it — the queue, the calendar, the admin the owner logs into — runs in one place and does not need to be near anybody. Only the ears do.
There are four country editions of this site, one for each place we can call: Australia, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. Each one has its own voices, its own calling hours and its own wording, because a call that sounds foreign is a call that gets hung up on.