Hi Everyone 👋 I'm Karthik, building an AI front desk for small businesses in India
Hi everyone! I'm Karthik, founder of Prophecius Media in India.
For the past few months I've been building Ora, an AI that answers customer messages for small businesses: clinics, salons, coaching institutes, property brokers and local shops.
Why : in India, almost every small business runs on WhatsApp. They get dozens of messages a day ("What's the fee?", "Any slot on Saturday?"), and most arrive after 9 PM, when nobody is around to reply. By morning, the customer has already gone to someone else.
Ora answers on WhatsApp, Instagram, the website and email, using only what the business has taught it. It replies in the customer's language, books appointments, and saves every enquiry as a lead. When it isn't sure, it hands the chat to a human.
The biggest thing I've learned so far: business owners don't care about "AI". They care about one question, "Did I lose a customer last night?" Every time I made the product simpler, more people used it.
I'm here to learn from other makers, especially anyone selling to small businesses or building on WhatsApp. I'm planning a proper launch here soon, so any advice on what makes a launch work would mean a lot.
What are you all building? Happy to try your products and give feedback too 🙂
Replies
Welcome, Karthik. My own support sits at the careful end of what Ora does: an AI drafts each reply in the language the user wrote in, from a fixed file of facts about the app, and I edit it and press send myself. The fixed facts file is the part that matters most, same as your "only what the business has taught it". Curious about your handoff: how does Ora decide it isn't sure? A confidence score, or a list of topics it never answers on its own?