How long does setup actually take?

You will see “live in 5 minutes” across this market. It is true in the same way that a car is drivable in five minutes if you do not mind where it goes.

Connecting a number and having something answer is genuinely quick. Having something answer correctly, about your business is the actual project, and it is worth understanding what it consists of before comparing timelines.

The three parts, honestly

Connecting the channels. Genuinely fast. Your telephony account and Meta’s one-popup signup for WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Hours, not days, and mostly waiting on approvals rather than work.

Getting your knowledge in. The real work. Prices, services, hours, what you do and do not take on, how far you travel, what you need from a customer before booking, what to do with the awkward requests. Most of this exists in your head rather than written down, which is why it takes longer than people expect — the effort is retrieval, not typing.

Making it sound like you. How it opens, how formal it is, which language it leads in, what it says when it does not know. This is iterative: you listen to real calls and adjust.

Why “5 minutes” is a claim about a demo

A five-minute setup produces an assistant working from generic defaults. It will answer confidently and be wrong about your prices, which is worse than not answering — a missed call costs you one customer, a confidently wrong price costs you the argument afterwards.

The honest version is that the speed is a function of how ready your answers are, not how good the software is.

How to speed it up

If you want this to go quickly, do one thing before you talk to any vendor: write down the eight questions you answer most, with the answers. Actual prices, actual hours, actual policies.

Businesses that arrive with that are set up dramatically faster than businesses that arrive with “you’ll figure it out from the website” — because the website does not say what you tell people on the phone.

What we do

Onboarding is a paid, one-time piece of work, priced on our pricing page and confirmed after a short review of what your assistant needs to know. It exists precisely because getting your real answers in is not something you should have to do alone, and because the version where you do it alone is the version that ends badly.

After that, changes are yours: correct the knowledge base and every channel changes at once, with no redeploy and no waiting on us.

⚠️ Set the expectation properly on the first week. You should expect to listen to real calls and adjust. Any vendor implying you configure once and walk away is describing a product that does not exist.

The question to ask

Not “how fast can you go live”, but: “what do you need from me, and what happens in week two when it gets something wrong?”

The first question has the same answer everywhere. The second one separates them.