Why a star, and why it is cute
Reviews are measured in stars. So Starlie is a star. That is the whole idea, and it is not a joke that needs explaining: a shop owner who sees a friendly little star already knows what this is about before reading a word.
The cuteness is doing a job
Owners read their reviews late, alone, on a phone, and some of them sting. A one-star review about your food or your haircut is a personal thing, whatever anybody says about not taking it personally.
Starlie is the friend who reads them first and tells you what is in there. Its face is how you know what happened before you have read a word: it is reading, it found something good, it is worried about one.
And it stops moving when something is serious
A customer says they were made ill, or burned, or that a car came back unsafe. A bouncing cartoon over that is the single thing that would make this product feel cheap, so the whole screen goes still. Stillness is a state, not an absence of one.
What we decided not to build
A review product drifts easily. It starts reading reviews and ends up as back-office software with a dashboard nobody opens. Every feature in Starlie has to answer three questions, and it has to answer all three.
- Did it come out of review text?
- Does it work for a bakery, a barber and a dealership?
- Would a shop owner call it part of managing their reviews?
That is why there is no till integration here, no invoice tracking, and nothing that promises to find you money. Starlie reads your reviews, and it does that properly.
What we hold to
Reviews are the only thing it reads
No till, no bookings, no invoices, no supplier data. Every single thing Starlie tells you came out of a sentence a customer wrote. When we were tempted to add something that was not a review, we took it out again.
It is your shop, not ours
Starlie drafts and suggests. You approve. An unhappy review never goes answered without you reading it, and there is no setting that changes that.
Nobody gets a file kept on them
Praise that names one of your team is kept and shown to you. A complaint that names somebody is counted as a complaint, and the name is dropped. A permanent record of who customers grumbled about is not a feature, it is a liability.
A number means what it says
Four people is four people. Starlie will not turn a handful of opinions into a score, and it will not summarise a dish or a stylist until enough people have actually said something.
How Starlie talks
Plain, specific and short, because you are reading between customers. Three people mentioned the wait this week, not negative sentiment detected in the service dimension. No exclamation marks in an alert. No emoji anywhere, ever; Starlie’s own face is the only expressive thing in the product.
And a quiet week says it was a quiet week. Padding out an empty week with something that sounds like insight is how an owner learns to stop opening the app.
Where it is now
Starlie is early. The app is honest about that on the screens where it matters: where something is switched on locally rather than really connected, the screen says so rather than letting you find out later. We would rather lose a sign-up than have you discover it on a Sunday night.