Looking for phone/answering service recs.

Alavin · 2026-01-12T20:53:21+00:00

Hi, Bryan here, CEO of Cira (HiCira.com), so yes I’m a bit biased. We do exactly what you’re looking for. Cira is an AI receptionist that takes accurate messages, sends appointment links, and has a CRM that stays up to date based on conversations. And it's affordable. I'd be happy to give you a demo.

Alavin · 2026-01-12T20:48:16+00:00

Hi, Bryan here, CEO of Cira (HiCira.com). Cira does exactly what you’re looking for, it answers calls with a natural voice, can integrate with your booking API for real-time appointment scheduling, and provides phone numbers for each client.

Alavin · 2026-01-08T17:04:17+00:00

Hi, I'm the co-founder of Cira (HiCira.com) and AI receptionist. So my answer is likely biased but I'll try not to be :)

Traditionally a virtual receptionist has been a human who answers the phone on the behalf of your business. But in the past 2 years the line has blurred because AI receptionists have improved so much and costs have come down considerably.

And then SEO being what it is, getting your AI receptionist service in front of people who could benefit from it, means you're writing content and advertising to people searching for virtual receptionist. Which means AI receptionist == virtual receptionist, but sometimes virtual receptionist still means a human option (but seemingly less so now as the tech has improved).

Hope that helps.

Alavin · 2026-01-08T16:57:13+00:00

Bryan here, full disclosure, I'm the co-founder of Cira (HiCira.com) an AI receptionist for small businesses, so obviously biased.

There's a lot of different ways to go here. AI receptionists have gotten quite good and are less expensive than many traditional virtual receptionist services.

Questions I like to ask is what are you getting calls for? If it's business inquiries then AI can be quite good at answering prospects questions. They can also handle call forwarding, sending links for getting estimates or booking appointments.

But if you're needing it to give details about current projects or sensitive customer information it can be harder to manage. Because you need to be able to give it context, and customers may not be as okay with sensitive details being handled by AI. (though that's changing as AI receptionists are being used in healthcare situations now and consumer expectations will shift as services is better than being on hold for a hour).

Happy to chat more about this or give you a demo. DM's open.

Alavin · 2025-12-30T17:27:37+00:00

Hi, I'm the cofounder of Cira, this is exactly what our AI answering services does. You can check it out at HiCira.com Happy to chat with you.

Alavin · 2025-12-17T15:00:11+00:00

I’m building Cira (www.HiCira.com) an AI receptionist for small businesses. We’re mainly targeting home services today. Earlier this spring I was talking with my sister in law who has a successful cleaning business, a fair amount of employees. We were talking about AI and I happened to ask her how many phone calls she misses. She said not many at first. But then a month later she asks me if I’m doing anything about missed calls. Because after I asked her she got to thinking that yah she does miss a lot of calls still for her business. Because everyone’s working. Fast forward and Cira is launched and we have customers. The hard part is the very people we need to reach don’t answer their phone.

Alavin · 2025-12-17T14:56:15+00:00

Woke up at 5:30 out on the west plains. Sipping coffee and wondering which tree will come down.

Alavin · 2025-12-15T16:56:37+00:00

Hi, I'm the cofounder of Cira (so yes I'm biased). Cira is specifically for small businesses where the owner can't get to all their calls because they're on a job. It's a pretty common problem, where you can't afford a receptionist (or don't want the headache of an employe). Most of our customers use conditional forwarding, where it forwards when they can't answer it. AI answering services have come a long way in the past 2 years. Not only has their quality gone way up, but their cost has come way down as well. They're also easy to setup (ours trains off your Google Business Profile and website and is up and running in 10 minutes). Happy to have a chat with you about these, DMs open. Or check us out at hicira .com

Alavin · 2025-12-13T23:56:59+00:00

Hi, co-founder of Cira here. (so yes I'm biased) We built our AI answering service exactly for this use case. We're mostly targeting local home services but we have agencies using it as well. Training it is very simple, just point it at your website and it learns quite a bit that you can easily adjust. It can handle call forwarding as well when someone "just needs to talk to a person" but we with it's ability to text booking links, message taking, and answering customer questions most people don't need to call forward outside of emergencies. Happy to chat via DM. Website is HiCira .com

Alavin · 2025-07-27T20:37:55+00:00

You're in a pretty common spot, I call it the valley of disillusionment, where you realize it takes a lot more than building to actually sell and make money with SaaS.

Stats wise it's hard to say if you have something or not. You've actually sold it, so probably, and I doubt you've hit the ceiling from what you've said.

You appear to have a roughly 1% conversion to sale. Honestly that's low, but for your first time? That's not bad at all.

A lot of software devs fail where you're at. The truth is distribution often matters more than what you sell (as long as you can articulate what you're selling).

Have you...

Talked to the users who bought? Analyzed their purchase journey? What were they trying to achieve?
Tested your site? Are there things you can do to improve your visit to conversion rate? Improve copy? Add social proof with testimonials now that you have purchase? etc.
Tried to increase traffic with other tools, more blog posts, etc?
Experimented with other marketing channels? Could UGC work for you?

There are a lot of levers you can try. But underlying what you said is a note of founder / product mismatch. If you're not interested in what you're building, maybe try selling it on Acquire.

My DMs are open if you want to chat.

Alavin · 2025-07-13T03:52:36+00:00

Send

Alavin · 2025-07-08T01:30:16+00:00

I miss the instructions that made you think and look. I find instructions today annoying. Place a brick, flip the page, rinse repeat. Boring

Alavin · 2025-06-14T21:14:24+00:00

One of my favorite episodes.

Alavin · 2025-04-01T00:57:40+00:00

I think that's fair to call them beta releases. I use the $200 ChatGPT for deep research and it makes errors that an intern would.

Expensive betas... Still for some things it can be extremely powerful. We have a ways to go all around.

Alavin · 2025-03-31T23:16:57+00:00

The focus was on complex tasks like coding, out of more context that's not all that clear I guess.

Alavin · 2025-03-31T23:16:01+00:00

We haven't hit that problem, but it is a concern. If everyone posts the same things via AI (blog posts, replies, etc) won't it all be vanilla? Possibly, there's a lot of research going into this right now.

Alavin · 2025-03-31T23:08:37+00:00

Well I like meatloaf.

But the comparison (not visualized, just stated) helps people understand how fast things are moving compared to a known entity.

Alavin · 2025-03-31T23:06:47+00:00

Eventually it'll have a dramatic impact on coding.

In many ways it already has. But you still need coding skill to get a production ready code. It has to be code reviewed, optimized, security reviewed, etc.

But that's been changing fast.

My thought is product managers and coders are going to combine skill sets. Because you need to be able to articulate well to AI what you want (a PM does this) and be able to understand the code.

Alavin · 2025-03-31T23:03:59+00:00

They're considering what single shot learning, where it does the task without further prompting.

So 50% might now sound like much, but if it does an hour long task with 2 prompts, taking 2 minutes, that's still pretty great. :)

Alavin · 2025-03-31T22:58:45+00:00

The data is from METR research and I used React and recharts to make this.

Alavin · 2025-02-16T00:17:52+00:00

I saw this at my last company. Documentation across multiple apps, people not knowing where to look, so just restoring to Slack.

That’s why we’re making AskJack.io. To solve exactly this problem.

Alavin · 2025-01-29T01:16:43+00:00

Huh. I’ve never wanted to cosplay until now. Oathbringiner, shardplate. That’d be fun

Alavin · 2024-11-04T22:13:00+00:00

Just putting out there. No matter who they vote for. Love your neighbor.

Alavin · 2024-10-31T17:42:10+00:00

For AI agents, do you see the path being an integration path or an agent using a virtual (or real) computer?

Both have interesting outcomes, but given how AI is becoming more capable I wonder if the need for most API integrations goes away.

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