What Reeve does

Reeve is the operations layer for a one-to-three-person service business. The operator does the actual work; Reeve does everything around it.

The day, before Reeve

A solo plumber gets eighty messages between Monday morning and Friday close. Fifteen turn into jobs. The other sixty-five are "are you in my area?", "what do you charge for a water heater?", "did you get my last text?", "can you come Saturday?". Each one needs a reply. Each reply needs to land within an hour or the customer books somebody else.

The plumber's day looks like this. Drive to the job. Answer three texts at the red light. Pull up to the customer's house, realize they wanted Friday not Thursday because the operator misread the calendar. Apologize. Do the work. Drive to the next one. Two missed calls, three new texts, a voicemail from someone asking about a quote sent two weeks ago. By 6 PM the operator is physically tired and emotionally exhausted by the inbox. The invoice for today's job will go out next Tuesday, maybe. The follow-up on the unpaid invoice from last month won't happen this week.

What Reeve does instead

Reeve answers the phone, the texts, and the email. It draws on the operator's actual schedule, pricing, and history — not a generic FAQ. When a customer asks "how much for a water heater install?", Reeve answers with the operator's real range. When they ask "can you come Tuesday?", Reeve checks the calendar, finds the slot, and either books it or says "Tuesday is full; Thursday morning?" When the job is done, Reeve sends the invoice the same day. When the invoice is two weeks overdue, Reeve sends a polite nudge. When it's a month overdue, a firmer one. When the customer replies "I never got that invoice," Reeve resends and confirms.

The operator sees all of this in a queue. For the first thirty days they approve every action — every reply, every booking, every invoice — before it goes out. The approve/edit/reject pattern is the operator teaching Reeve their preferences: "we don't quote over text", "we don't book Sundays", "we always include the trip charge". After thirty days, Reeve has learned enough to ship the boring stuff on its own. After ninety, the operator's role narrows to spot-checking: only the consequential decisions (a quote over $5,000, a refund, a pricing-policy change) need a human signal.

The concrete surface

Phone (voice)

A real phone number. Customers call. Reeve answers. Initial version: voicemail with intelligent transcription that drafts an SMS reply for the operator's approval. Later: live conversational receptionist that books appointments by voice in the moment.

SMS

The same number receives texts. Reeve drafts replies that match the operator's tone, with the right context (this customer called yesterday about a leaking sink; their last service was eight months ago; they always pay the day-of). Operator approves or edits in a queue.

Email (Gmail)

Gmail OAuth into the operator's existing inbox. Reeve reads incoming email, drafts replies in the operator's voice, threads them correctly. The operator's inbox stays theirs; Reeve is not a separate tool with a separate identity.

Calendar (Google Calendar)

Bookings land on the operator's actual calendar — the one their spouse already shares, the one their phone notifies them about. No new app to check.

Invoicing & payments (Stripe Connect & QuickBooks)

Reeve drafts invoices from completed jobs, sends them through the operator's existing Stripe account (the operator is the merchant of record; Reeve never holds funds), and syncs to QuickBooks if the operator uses it.

Collections

Polite, escalating follow-ups on unpaid invoices. Operators historically left this work undone because they hated doing it; Reeve doesn't.

What Reeve doesn't do (yet)

No marketing. No SEO. No lead generation. No multi-business operators. No staff coordination. No inventory beyond a simple item list. The product is the inbox-to-invoice loop for one person who answers the phone. Everything else is an explicit not-yet.

Pricing

Fifty to a hundred dollars per month per business, target. We're not building a venture-scale outcome here. The math is "useful enough that the operator gladly pays a Costco membership a month for it" plus enough margin to cover compute and on-call.

Want to be the next design partner after the first one stabilizes? Write to hello@reeve.tools.