Hey community đź‘‹
by•
Building Upraise — an AI-powered Google review management tool for independent local businesses (cafés, restaurants, salons, shops).
The problem we kept finding: local business owners are losing customers to competitors purely because of their Google rating — bad reviews going unanswered, fake reviews dragging down their score, no system for getting more genuine reviews.
What we’re building:
→ AI drafts replies to every review automatically
→ Flags reviews violating Google’s policies for removal
→ Gets more genuine reviews coming in
→ Turns 5-star reviews into social media posts
Had 30+ business owners in one day tell us this is a real problem they face. Now building the MVP.
Would love feedback from anyone who’s sold to local SMBs or built in this space — what were your biggest lessons early on?
Waitlist 👉 https://www.getupraise.com 🙌”
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The detail that stands out is 30+ owners telling you this in one day. That kind of instant recognition usually means the pain is not hypothetical. From selling into that same audience, the biggest lesson for me was that local owners do not read pitches, they respond to one sentence that names their actual Tuesday. I ran a care home and a cafe, and the thing that got attention was never a feature list, it was something like reviews are piling up and you have not seen the bad one yet. I built FounderFlow for a different piece of the same owner's day, catching whatever is quietly slipping across the whole business, not just reviews. Question back to you, once an owner joins the waitlist, are you finding they want to see it working before they trust it, or does the review problem alone get them to commit?