Our Launch Story: Building Parys.Biz
There's something quietly exciting about building something real for your own community. Parys.biz started as a simple idea: what if every business in our small town had a modern online presence, backed by the kind of technology usually reserved for big-city companies? What if the butcher, the guesthouse, the event venue — all of them — could have their own AI assistant answering customer questions at 2am?
That idea turned into a proper build. And like most real builds, it didn't go entirely to plan.
The Paddle Problem (Two Weeks We Won't Forget)
Before a single customer could subscribe, we needed payments sorted. We chose Paddle — a well-regarded merchant of record that handles VAT, compliance, and billing globally. Great on paper.
What followed was two weeks of back-and-forth verification. Paddle is thorough — deliberately so. They review your business, your use case, your refund policy, your legal pages. We rewrote our refund policy. We updated our terms. We answered questions about how subscriptions worked. We waited.
It was genuinely frustrating at the time. But with hindsight? We're glad they're that careful. It means every business using Paddle — including us — has been properly reviewed. That's a layer of trust baked into the platform before it even launched.
When approval finally came through, it felt like crossing a finish line. Except the real race was just beginning.
The AI Bit (More Than We Expected)
The centrepiece of Parys.biz is the AI assistant — a chatbot that lives on each business listing and answers customer questions based entirely on that business's own information. Hours, location, services, pricing. No hallucinations, no making things up. If the business hasn't provided the answer, the assistant says so and points the customer to contact them directly.
Building it was the fun part. Testing it properly took far longer.
We tested every edge case we could think of:
- What happens when someone asks something completely off-topic?
- Does it stay on-brand when the conversation gets weird?
- Is it fast enough to feel responsive, not robotic?
- Does it actually help — or just sound like it helps?
We ran it through Groq (lightning-fast Llama 3.3) and Google Gemini, comparing responses, tuning the instructions, and stress-testing the prompts. The goal wasn't impressive demo answers. It was reliable, useful, honest answers — every time.
That took iteration. Lots of it.
Why AI, Though?
Fair question. We're a small town. Do businesses here really need AI?
Yes — and here's why.
Most small businesses can't afford to be always-on. A restaurant owner is cooking. A guesthouse host is checking guests in. A florist is arranging a wedding. Nobody has time to answer the same five questions from their website at all hours. An AI assistant that knows your business and answers on your behalf isn't a luxury — it's a relief.
AI lowers the barrier to entry for a professional online presence. Traditionally, a business would need a web developer, ongoing maintenance, and someone managing customer enquiries. With Parys.biz, you list your business, fill in your details, and your AI assistant is live. No technical knowledge required.
It levels the playing field. The café down the road doesn't have the budget of a national chain, but with AI-powered tools, they can offer the same quality of instant, knowledgeable response to customers. That's something worth building.
What We Launched With
- Business listings with rich profiles
- An AI assistant per listing, trained only on that business's information
- Subscription plans via Paddle (properly verified — we earned that one)
- A clean, fast experience built on Laravel and deployed on Laravel Cloud
It's live. It's real. And it's for Parys — our town.
What's Next
This is version one. We're already working on more ways to help local businesses get discovered, get leads, and get time back. If you run a business in Parys, list it today — and let your AI assistant handle the night shift.