Our story
Small Business Chatbot started with a pattern Arthur Cockfield kept running into at OneLocal (YC S17), where he was an early employee and Head of Growth. Working with hundreds of service businesses — plumbers, roofers, cleaners, law firms, clinics — he saw that in most of them the owner is the front desk. When the owner is on a ladder, in a crawl space, or with a customer, calls go to voicemail and website chats sit unanswered. And the lead usually goes to whichever competitor answers first.
The available fixes were all trade-offs. Traditional answering services read from a script and can't answer real questions about your services. Hiring a receptionist is a serious cost for a team of two or five people. And "just respond faster" is not a plan when you are the one doing the work. Once large language models became capable of holding a genuinely useful conversation, it finally became possible to build the front desk that small businesses had always needed but could never staff.
That is why we built Sarah, our AI employee. Sarah greets website visitors in chat, answers the phone, texts back missed calls, follows up on quotes and leads, and books appointments directly into the calendar. She is trained on each business's own services, pricing, and policies, so her answers are specific to that business rather than generic. Every conversation is summarized and handed off to the team, so the owner always knows what was said and stays in control.
Today Small Business Chatbot serves small service businesses across the United States and Canada. We are a small team ourselves, and we build like one: quick setup, plain-language settings, onboarding we handle for you, and no enterprise complexity. We measure our work in the terms owners actually care about — answered calls, booked jobs, and quotes that get a response instead of going quiet.
We also like hearing from the businesses we build for. If you have a question about the product, a partnership idea, or feedback on something we should do better, reach us through our contact page or book a call with Arthur directly using the button below.