Local Business Automation
WhatsApp flows, booking systems, AI agents
Booking, messaging and payment systems for eleven local businesses — designed for one shared Android phone and prepaid data.
01The situation
Local businesses in Palawan run on WhatsApp, Messenger and one shared Android phone. Most had already paid for booking software nobody used — built for laptops, stable internet and a full-time admin they don’t have.
02What we built
WhatsApp-first flows: an agent answers availability and prices, collects details and drafts the booking. The owner approves with one tap. Deposits go out as GCash links. Everything lands in a shared sheet the owner already understands.
Setup happens on-site, in the language the staff use, on the phone they already own.
03What broke
Prepaid data running out on the 20th. Staff changing phones without telling anyone. An agent too polite to ask for a deposit. We fixed the first two with process and the third with a firmer template.
04What’s next
A shared template library so a new guesthouse can go live in a day, and a simple monthly report showing owners what the system actually did for them.
Stories from this build
All stories
No. 046Automation
Why Local Businesses Fail with Tech (and How We Fix It)
It’s almost never the software. It’s that nobody designed for a two-person business running on one shared Android phone and prepaid data.
8 min read · 20 Sept
No. 044Agents
Deploying AI Agents in a Province with Unstable Internet
Our agents assume the connection will drop. Here’s the architecture that lets them queue, retry, and still hand every message to a human on time.
10 min read · 6 Sept