JOLA, a small Melbourne studio
We design, build and run AI agents, apps, online stores and SaaS for clients. We learned the running part on seven products of our own, which are all still live.
(01)What we run
We designed, wrote and shipped every one of these. We still run them, and keeping them going is our job.
Benvena gives small and medium businesses Lily, an AI front desk. She answers website chat and phone calls from facts the business has approved, and emails the owner anything she can't.
EscapeTo is a camping search engine for the US, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina and Chile. It puts campgrounds, RV parks and free camps on a map and in a list, plans the road trip between them, and has an AI Camping Assistant for questions a filter can't ask.
Two of them are phone apps too. Camping Australia runs on iPhone and Android, and EscapeTo on iPhone.
(02)What we do
We take on six kinds of work, and you can see each one running today in a product of ours.
Front-desk agents that answer from facts you approve and pass the rest to a person, and assistants that help people search or make sense of their own data.
iOS and Android apps, along with the App Store and Google Play paperwork it takes to get them listed.
Shopify stores for things people like to research first, so the store answers their questions before it asks for the sale.
Apps that deal with one particular annoyance for merchants, like bot spam on store forms or carts left behind with no explanation.
Software people sign up to and come back to, built and then kept running by the people who wrote it.
Pages that answer what people type into Google, and the analytics to show which of them bring anyone in.
(03)How we use AI
AI that talks to your customers should only say what you would say. Here is how Lily, on Benvena, handles a question.
None of the three covers this one.
She uses the facts the owner has signed off, so the customer gets the answer the owner would have given.
“We're closed on public holidays. The rest of the year we're open Tuesday to Saturday, 9 am to 5.30 pm.”
“Yes. Parking is free in the car park behind the shop.”
Anything Lily can't answer from those facts lands in the owner's inbox instead.
A visitor asked “How much is a cut and colour?” There is no approved fact about prices, so Lily didn't give one.
A visitor asked “Can you match a colour from a photo?” No approved fact covers it, so Lily didn't guess.
We usually set up each Benvena business within about a week, so the owner isn't left to work it out alone.
Benvena's Chat plan and its Chat and phone plan are both live. Every call opens with Lily saying she's an AI assistant.
Campers use it alongside search and the road-trip planner, and where they stay is still their call.
The session replays, heatmaps and cart-stage tracking are there too, so merchants can see for themselves before changing anything.
(04)How we work
When you run seven products yourself, any shortcut you take comes back to bite you. We build yours as if it might bite us too.
Spambuster uses Google reCAPTCHA to stop spam and bot submissions on Shopify store forms. If yours needs no AI either, we'll tell you.
We plan search and content with the product. Oz BBQ has buying guides, and EscapeTo has pages for popular regions and routes.
The people who build your app or store are the people who run it afterwards, so you never have to referee between vendors.
We reply with questions, then write a scope we both agree on before anything is built.
You try it early. For an assistant like Lily, that's when you approve the facts it answers from.
We handle the App Store, Google Play or Shopify listing and the rest of launch day's paperwork.
We fix and update it the way we do our own seven, for as long as you want us on it.
Write to us about what you're building, or what you already have and want to grow. A few lines is plenty to start.
contact@jola.com.auThis opens your email app.
