Hi, I’m David Thomas.
If I had to sum up what I do in one sentence, I suppose I’m a problem-solver who enjoys building things. For the better part of two decades, I’ve been in the trenches of running small-to-medium businesses. The one thing that’s always stood out to me is that the idea of the business is the fun part; it’s the day-to-day administration, the complicated systems, and the repetitive paperwork that often become the biggest headaches.
My real passion is finding ways to untangle that complexity. I like to build tools—usually software—that simplify the hard stuff so business owners can get back to focusing on what they actually love doing.
This journey really started for me back in 2006 when I founded Simple Telecom. I saw a gap where small businesses were struggling to get the same professional tools as the “big end of town”—things like 1300 numbers, smart call routing, and reliable phone systems. It all seemed overly complicated and expensive. My goal was simple: take away all the confusing telco jargon and just provide solutions that were easy to implement and cost-effective. We wanted to give startups and small businesses the tools to compete.
You’d think one business would be enough, but the entrepreneurial bug is a funny thing.
Fast-forward to 2016. I purchased a local packaging business, thinking I was getting into boxes and tape. I learned very quickly that I was actually in the administration business. The amount of manual data entry, order processing, and stock management was overwhelming. It was the biggest pain point in the company.
Having already built systems for Simple Telecom, I started tinkering. I built a software platform just for my own packaging team, designed to automate our specific workflow and get rid of those admin headaches. It was never intended to be a public product; it was just an internal tool to help us run our own business more efficiently.
Things changed when one of our customers, a local coffee roaster, got a glimpse of the system we were using. He approached me and basically said, “I have the exact same problems in my roastery. Can you build something like that for me?”
We built a version for him on a shoestring budget, and as soon as it was up and running, three other coffee roasters approached me asking for the same thing.
That was the lightbulb moment. I realised this problem wasn’t unique to my packaging company. Small businesses everywhere, especially in niche industries like coffee roasting, were stuck. The massive enterprise software was far too expensive and rigid, and trying to run a growing business on spreadsheets was just chaotic. There was a huge gap right in the middle.
I had to put a pause on selling it because the system wasn’t built to scale. I took a step back and undertook a major redevelopment. We re-engineered the whole platform, allowing us to create secure, separate “slices” for each customer. It sounds technical, but it really just means we can spin up new, fully separated systems easily, which drastically reduces support overheads and keeps costs low for everyone.
We launched this new product, BSimple, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It felt like a crazy time to launch, but software waits for no one, and the need was clearly there.
Looking back, Simple Telecom and BSimple might seem like they operate in totally different worlds—one is telco, the other is business management software. But to me, they were born from the exact same idea: taking something complicated that businesses have to do, and making it simple, accessible, and affordable.
That’s what really drives me—helping other entrepreneurs and business owners clear those administrative hurdles so they can focus on their own vision.
Get in touch with me here:
david -at- gosimple.com.au
(replace -at- with @)