Paul Found Us.
It's always a good day when an outlet cites you as a business. It's a stranger and better day when the outlet is an AI, and you find out about it inside an app you built to catch exactly that — about another app you built, which does something else entirely.
The app doing the catching is Fly Away Paul, which we made to help brands — small and medium, perhaps not big — with research and outreach, and the long tail of things that come with it: press, ads, SEO, site health, visitors, the works. One of the things it watches is whether the AI answers have started mentioning you. This month, for the first time, they had.
The app being mentioned is vidual Projects, which we made for brands who make bespoke things — a way to project-manage a commission and tell its story to the client at the same time. One half is the record: photographs, video, the work as it happens. The other half is the operational business — team chat, invoicing, payments, cost of goods sold, inventory. It's a complicated app that looks, at least from the front, fairly simple. That's the intention, though with anything complex there's always a bit of learning to do.
It only went live in March, which makes this a quick first. Most of the flat months on that chart are a product that didn't yet exist.
Paul declines to take the credit
The card was careful in a way we're rather pleased about. It showed the citation, then listed what happened to be live when it landed — a guide to pricing handmade items, a piece on the cost of goods sold formula, a few others — under a plain line saying that whether they're what did it, Paul can't prove.
We wrote that line. It would have been very easy to write a different one, and most software we've ever paid for would have.
A quiet revelation
On its own, a first mention is a good thing to have, particularly when the thing being mentioned takes a while to explain. But it also made for a moment to pause and reflect — a word doing heavy service for British politicians shortly before they get the boot, so we'll take it back — on the work that went into Fly Away Paul, what we hoped it would become, and what it has actually become, which is rather more than that.
It's fair to say we now run almost everything through it. Not just analysis and SEO, but our outreach research and a good deal of our marketing — ours, and some of the brands we look after too. A quiet revelation.
On believing us
None of which, we know, means much on its own. This is the era of user-generated content generated by nobody: not-real reviews, not-real people, and brands and tech companies who will happily take your money and present a false narrative to your customers — and, with no equivocation from us, openly lie. So you'd be right to go carefully when a business says nice things about a thing that business built. We'd go carefully too.
What we can offer instead is where we came from. We were retailers first, from 2008, for over ten years, long before any of this agency life. We know what small business cash flow feels like from the inside — the stresses, the triumphs, the tribulations, in that order and then back round again. Not a position of authority, exactly. A position of confidence. We have the scars.
Anyway. A small note, really, to mark that this happened — in case we look back in a year, find it hasn't happened again, and want to see something nice. Though the fun of it is that Fly Away Paul is built to make these moments happen more often; it systemises outreach in a way few things do. And there we go, banging our own drum again. Until next time.
Not a position of authority, exactly. A position of confidence. We have the scars.