Your website is not broken. Nobody's home.
That is worse, because an empty room looks fine. Nobody calls you about a website where nobody's home. It sits there in perfect health, saying the same eleven things it said in 2019, to everyone, forever, while people arrive with a real problem and leave without a single word being spoken to them.
You would never allow that in your building. Someone walks in, stands there for forty seconds, and walks back out without anyone looking up. You would have a conversation with somebody about it that afternoon.
We build the alternative. And because we believe this is how it should be done everywhere, not just by us, we wrote down the rules we hold ourselves to and published them. So you can hold us to them. And so anyone else building one of these has a bar to clear.
The five rules
1. It tells you what it is, and who is reading.
In practice: every conversation opens with the whole truth, before anyone asks for it.
"I'm Dave's assistant. I'm an AI, and I work for Dave. Everything you write here, he reads himself, and he answers."
The AI label also sits on the assistant's face, on screen, permanently. Not in a footer. Not on a policy page.
What this costs us: some visitors relax more with a human, and we give that up on purpose. The second sentence costs the business owner more than it costs us, because it is a promise they then have to keep. We will not work with an owner who will not keep it.
Why both halves: being told you are talking to software feels like a downgrade. Being told a named person is reading every word of it is an upgrade. You get the assistant and the owner. Most people write more honestly once they know that.
2. It never prices, diagnoses, or promises on its own authority.
In practice: it can name a pattern and tell you what work like yours usually involves. What it will not do is invent an answer about your specific situation, because it has not seen it and it is not the person who will do the work. Whether it estimates, advises, or books is the owner's call: hand it a price framework and it estimates from it; give it service rules and it advises within them. It acts on its owner's authority, never its own.
What this costs us: instant invented answers convert better than honest ones. We accept the slower path, because a number the owner never approved is a number somebody has to walk back later.
3. It keeps every conversation warm until it is finished.
In practice: every conversation ends with a next step, and wherever possible that next step is booked, not promised. If the business owner does not respond, the assistant chases the owner. If that fails, it comes back to you and tells you the truth about where things stand. Communication ends when you end it, not when we get busy.
What this costs us: it is far cheaper to collect an email address and call it a lead. Following through is work, and we built the work in.
4. It still works when our systems do not.
In practice: if the intelligence behind the door goes offline, the door still opens and your message still reaches a human. A degraded front office is still a front office. It is never an empty page.
What this costs us: engineering time on a scenario most vendors treat as somebody else's problem.
5. It asks before it tells.
In practice: the first thing that happens is a question about you, not a pitch about us. You cannot be helped by someone who has not understood you, and you cannot be sold to honestly either.
What this costs us: nothing. This is the one rule that costs us nothing at all, which is why it is remarkable that almost nobody does it.
One more thing we will not do
We will never tell you that you are not the right fit.
That sentence belongs to you, not to us, and no assistant that has known you for ninety seconds has earned the standing to say it. If we cannot help, we will point you at someone who can. Nobody gets turned away by a machine.
Why publish rules that cost us money
Because a promise is cheap and a public refusal to take the easy win is not.
Anyone can add a chat window to a website by Friday. The hard part is building one that will not oversell, and then saying so out loud where customers and competitors can both read it. If we break one of these rules, you have this page.
To anyone else building one of these
Take it. Use the name, use the rules, hold your own build to them. A standard with one signatory is not a standard.
We would rather compete against businesses that follow this than against businesses that do not.