Most people don’t realise that the beginnings of Astalty started with a simple Airtasker job.
Back in the day, I posted a task to see if anyone could help me build a way to export invoices from QuickBooks into PRODA.
Manually uploading them one by one was painful. It was repetitive, slow, and completely avoidable…
Back then, everything was manual; this was probably the first time I managed to semi-automate a process… if you could even call it that.
This is how I met James.
He responded to the job, delivered a spreadsheet that did the job, and, in case you’re wondering.
…… Yes, he got a five-star review for it.
That small job turned into years of collaboration. James started helping with everything from the development of the Empowered website to streamlining our weekly invoicing and payroll.
Even then, he was great at finding smart solutions to complex problems.
He somehow managed to bring down our reconciliation process from over an hour to just a few minutes.
Don’t ask me how, it just worked.
Over the years, we kept working together. We’d spend hours on the phone talking through the ins and outs of the NDIS. A lot of people assume James worked for a provider, but truthfully, everything he knows about the NDIS (Well, a lot of it) came from the conversations we had.
I remember once, driving to Sydney, we got into a random chat about all the NDIS funding categories, what they meant, what they covered, and how the whole system worked.
He just soaked it all in.
At some point, James had actually built a cloud-based platform for an Allied Health professional, and half-jokingly said,
“We should build something for the NDIS.”
We joked about it a few more times… until one day in 2021, we weren’t joking anymore.
We registered the company, signed the paperwork, and started mapping out what would eventually become Astalty.
One of the original ideas for the brand name was “Newsolve.”
Looking back, I’m glad we never went with it, it just doesn’t hit like Astalty does.
And that’s how it started.
A simple Airtasker job, a shared obsession with solving problems, and the belief that the NDIS space deserved something better - Astalty
