Answers
Straight answers to the questions buyers actually ask.
Custom software, ecommerce, apps, integrations, automation, security and growth — one question per page, answered first and then in full. Where our own systems are the evidence, they are named and linked.
Custom software
- Custom software or off-the-shelf: how do you decide?Buy by default, and build only the part no vendor sells. Custom starts to make sense when your price is a calculation, when your business runs on a noun no product has a table for, when per-seat cost outgrows the work, or when the integrations have become the system.
- When does per-seat software pricing stop making sense?When the bill grows with headcount but the work does not. The usual cause is cheap seats — field crews, seasonal staff, people who read one screen a month — counted the same as everyone else. Find your own crossover by putting last year's invoice next to last year's headcount.
- Why should business software never store money as a float?Because a float cannot store most decimal amounts exactly: 0.1 is already slightly wrong before any arithmetic runs. Across a job, those tiny errors become invoices whose lines do not match their totals and ledger entries that do not balance. Store money as an integer number of cents, and round once.
- How do you prove business software is correct before launch?Write down what correct looks like before building, then check the real system against it rather than reading the code and feeling confident. Results that reproduce exactly in two environments, and verification against the live system, are checks you can run instead of reviews you have to trust.
- What is a strangler-pattern replacement of an old system?It means replacing an old system piece by piece while it keeps running: build one bounded part beside it, move that part's work across, and repeat only if the next piece earns it. It avoids the big-bang rewrite, where everything changes on one risky day.
Ecommerce
- How do you build a 301 redirect map for a large online store?List every URL the old store served, give each the closest live destination on the new store, and verify the whole map against the new site before the DNS changes. Exact product matches redirect mechanically; everything else needs a destination a person has checked actually answers the old page.
- Why is freight the hardest part of selling heavy products online?Because the carrier's price depends on things most product catalogues never record — carton dimensions, weight, how pieces combine on a pallet — and it has to be known before checkout, not after. Get it wrong and heavy orders are either overcharged or quietly losing money.
- What are the options when WooCommerce can't handle your catalogue?There are three realistic options: keep extending WooCommerce, move to a packaged platform, or build a storefront around the catalogue itself. Whichever you choose, moving the indexed URLs, supplier data and pricing logic is most of the work, and it decides whether the move is safe.
- How do you merge supplier feeds into one product catalogue?Read what each feed actually contains, map every supplier's fields and units onto one schema, and match products on identifiers such as SKUs before anything fuzzier. What cannot be matched with confidence goes to a person rather than being guessed.
Web & mobile apps
- How does an in-browser room visualiser work?The customer's photo is analysed on their own device: a segmentation model marks which pixels are floor, wall or cabinet, new materials are rendered onto those surfaces in perspective, and one reference line gives real measurements. Nothing is uploaded.
- What is passwordless sign-in, and should a business app use it?Passwordless sign-in lets people log in with a one-time code or link sent to their email or phone instead of a password. For most business apps it is the better default: nothing to forget or reuse, and no password database to leak.
- Is on-device AI more private than sending photos to the cloud?Usually, yes: if the model runs on the person's own device, the photo never leaves it, so there is no copy on a server to secure, retain or leak. The trade-off is that on-device models must be small enough for a browser or phone, which suits bounded tasks rather than everything.
Integrations
- What is idempotency, and why does it matter for payments?Idempotency means that processing the same request twice has the same effect as processing it once. Payment systems retry requests and resend events as a matter of course, so without it a network hiccup can charge a customer twice or pay a vendor twice.
- When does a business outgrow Zapier-style automation tools?When the automations have become the system: the bill grows with task count, workflows depend on each other, and someone's morning starts by checking that last night's sync ran. At that point the logic is worth owning, even if the hosted tool stays for simple jobs.
- What is EDI, and does a small distributor need it?EDI is a set of standard formats trading partners use to exchange orders, invoices and shipping notices system to system, instead of by email or phone. A small distributor usually needs it only when a large trading partner makes it a condition of doing business.
- Why do software integrations keep breaking after launch?Because the systems on the other end keep changing. Every connector is a promise to keep up with somebody else's API, and most integration failures are quiet: an event that never arrives, a field that changes meaning, a credential that expires.
Automation & AI agents
- What is an AI agent, in plain terms?An AI agent is software that uses a language model to decide its next step and act through tools — reading a document, calling an API, drafting a reply — rather than following only fixed rules. In a real business process, the useful ones are mostly code with a model at one or two steps.
- Which parts of a business process should use AI, and which code?Use a model for steps that read messy input, draft something, or classify something genuinely fuzzy. Use code for anything that must give the same answer every time — arithmetic, money, compliance, routing rules. Often two steps in a process should involve a model, and the rest should be code.
- What is n8n, and when is it the right tool?n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool: a trigger — a webhook, a schedule, a new record — starts a chain of steps that moves data between systems. It can be self-hosted, and it suits repeatable, rule-bound processes, as long as logic that must be exact lives in code it calls.
- Can an AI voice agent answer a small business's phone?Yes. An AI voice agent can answer calls, book appointments, take orders and text confirmations, and the good ones are built never to go silent. Asisly, our own voice receptionist, does this in thirty-three languages.
- How does automated short-form video production work?A pipeline runs the same stages every time — script, source footage, voice, render, publish, attribute — on a schedule, with a person reviewing drafts before anything reaches an audience. The hard part is not any single stage but keeping the whole thing running when one provider fails.
- How much of a small business can realistically be automated?There is no honest percentage, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What can be measured is which processes qualify: repeatable, rule-bound, high-touch and error-prone ones are candidates, volume ranks them, and anything needing taste or legal judgement keeps a person at one gate.
Cybersecurity
- What should a first security review of a business app cover?Start with who can get in and what they can reach: authentication, authorisation, session handling and tenancy boundaries. Then secrets, dependencies, how the app is deployed, and whether backups have ever been restored. The output should be ranked findings you can act on, not a generic checklist.
- What is a dependency and supply-chain audit?It is a review of everything your software pulls in from outside — libraries, packages, base images, build tools — checking what you actually ship, what it depends on, and what is no longer maintained. Much of a modern application is code someone else wrote, so that is where much of the risk sits.
- Why doesn't a backup count until you've restored it?Because a backup is only a claim until you have restored from it. Restores fail for ordinary reasons — missing files, missing credentials, a copy nobody checked, a restore that takes far longer than the business can wait — and those are better found on a quiet day.
Growth & marketing
- What is llms.txt, and does a business website need one?llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website that gives AI tools a short summary of the site and a curated list of its most useful pages. It is a proposed convention, cheap to publish, and most useful for sites with substantial content worth pointing to.
- How does a business show up in AI search answers?By publishing clear, specific answers that AI systems can fetch, understand and quote: pages that answer one question directly, structured data that says what each page is, and facts that read the same everywhere the business appears. Nobody controls citations, but these are what the answers are built from.
- Why should a business publish its own numbers?Because a number a reader can check is worth more than an impressive one they cannot. Publishing counts from your own work — products, workflows, tests — instead of percentages and testimonials makes every claim traceable, and it filters for buyers who value that.
Working with us
- What should a free software audit include?A written assessment of what your current systems actually do, where money or time leaks between them, what is safe to keep, and what fixing it would involve — ranked, specific, and with a scope and cost range. It should be useful even if you hire someone else to do the work.
- Fixed price or hourly: how should a software build be priced?Fixed price, once the scope is understood — and not before. Hourly billing pushes every overrun onto you, while a fixed price quoted before anyone has looked is a guess. The honest sequence is an audit first, then a fixed-scope, fixed-price build against a working first slice.