Answer your enquiries, even with your hands full.

You'd be one of the first. Here's what that means, both ways.

I'd rather tell you the awkward part up front than have you find it halfway through signing up.

Businesses where the person answering is also the person working.

• Hair, beauty and nails. Treatments, prices and times from your own list, with skin-test rules applied before a slot is ever offered. How it works for salons.
• Dog grooming and pet care. Services and durations, checked against your diary.
• Driving instructors. Lesson prices, block bookings and the "have you got any space" question, answered while you're in the car with someone else.
• Massage, reflexology and foot health. Appointment lengths and the rules you already apply before you'll book somebody in. If you travel to clients, read this.
• Cleaning, valeting and oven cleaning. Anything with a set price or a sensible "from" price, against the hours you actually work.
• Tutors, instructors and personal trainers. Sessions, blocks, and the times you have left this week.
• Catteries, boarding and party hire. Being built alongside the owners — date ranges, vaccination rules, delivery areas. Get in touch and your enquiries can shape it.

Not on that list? The shape matters more than the trade. If you sell named things at prices you could write on a page, into a diary you keep, it fits. That's most one-person businesses, and a fair few with a small team.

When I'd tell you not to bother. If every job needs you to see it before you can price it, it'll hand nearly everything back to you and you'll be paying for a middleman. If you already have an online booking system that works for you, this won't be worth your money. And if your business email isn't Gmail, it can't help you at all yet. I'd rather say all three than sell it to you.

Three things it can't work without, and three that decide how well it works.

Worth two minutes now rather than finding out after you've entered a card.

What I can see, and what I can't.

It runs on my servers rather than your computer, so it can work while you're with a client. That means being straight about what it touches.

• It reads only emails carrying the Assistant label. Nothing else in your mailbox is looked at.
• It creates one Gmail filter, the one that applies that label so you never have to. It only adds the label — it never archives, deletes, marks as read or moves anything — and closing your account removes it again.
• It never sends email. Google's permissions don't separate writing a draft from sending one, so the ability is technically there — and there is no send instruction anywhere in the code, with a test that stops the build if one is added. Every draft waits for you.
• Your diary is read-only, and it must be a Google Calendar. One calendar, which you pick during setup. It sees when you're busy and cannot create, move or delete a thing — but it also can't see anything that isn't in there. If your appointments live on paper, or inside Fresha or Booksy, it will offer times you're already booked. Both of those can sync to Google Calendar; do that first.
• It never stores what's in your emails. Per enquiry it keeps the subject line, the sender's first name and what it did. That's all your activity log is made of.
• Simple enquiries are worked out on my own server. Anything with unusual wording — in practice a good share of them — goes to Google's Gemini in my own Google Cloud project on paid terms, so it trains nothing. Your log marks every single one that did.
• I hold an encrypted key to your Google account so all of that can happen while you're busy. One tap on your settings page deletes it and withdraws it at Google.

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