It started with one personal trainer
He was paying for Instagram ads that worked. That was the problem.
The ads brought him enquiries at every hour — a lot of them from people several timezones away, messaging at two in the morning his time. By the time he finished a session, showered, and got to his phone, there were twenty-six unread chats.
Four of them were people who would have paid. He could not tell which four without reading all twenty-six, and reading all twenty-six took the evening he did not have. So he replied to some, missed others, and the ones he missed booked with somebody who answered faster.
He described this to us as “I’m bad at follow-up”. He was not. He was one person doing the job he was actually paid for while a machine that never sleeps sent him strangers.
What we found when we looked
It was not a personality flaw and it was not rare. It is measured, repeatedly, in every industry that has bothered to measure it.
more likely to qualify a lead when you reply within five minutes rather than thirty.
is the average business response time — and 63% of enquiries never get a reply at all.
of customers buy from whoever answers them first.
What we decided not to build
There is no shortage of WhatsApp tools. Almost all of them are built around sending: bulk campaigns, broadcast lists, template blasts. Sending is the easy half. Nobody was building the half that says this one, call this one first.
So TapQual is not a blasting tool. It answers, asks, scores and ranks — and it tells your ad account which leads turned out to be real so it stops buying you browsers. When it does send to many, it sends to your own leads, by score, and shows you Meta's price before you press the button.
The second thing we decided not to build was a call-centre. Our customers have two or three people, not thirty, and the CRM they need is the one that fits in the chat they already use: a lead lands with a person, a reminder arrives on WhatsApp, a manager hears when nobody replied. Seats are included rather than sold by the head. If your shop runs on Ordello, the orders come along too. That is the whole product, and keeping it that narrow is deliberate.
Who builds it
Alornix Technologies, in Kochi, Kerala, India. We build a small number of products for small businesses and we use them ourselves. TapQual is one of them.
If something here is broken, an actual person reads [email protected] and answers it.