I made a thing called 'I Do Review'
/ 3 min read
I’m not good at documenting projects, if only because I launch so many and then shut them down seconds later. I don’t like judging a paper aeroplane until it’s been shot into the air by a hand, but then I have no problem trashing the aircraft if it doesn’t fly.
But I think this one will fly.
The problem I’m trying to solve
Online reviews are an important aspect of running a business in 2024. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and well-schema-d reviews are how the algorithims that drive business today know that you’re a good business.
I wrote about this on my wedding celebrant website:
Your wedding vendor reviews can make a world of difference! They help future couples find their dream team and show appreciation for the people who made your day magical. Take a moment to leave a review—it’s the easiest way to pay the love forward.
But leaving online reviews is hard, people don’t always want to, or they don’t know what to say.
So I wanted to solve the problem of what to say.
The solution
A web form asking some good quetions, feeding those questions and answers into a good large language model prompt and giving the client some text to copy and paste.
The website
- I thought of some good domain names and quickly registerd idoreview.com.au because the alliteration won me over along with it being available. review.reviews sounded nice but wasn’t worth the $10k.
- I’ve been learning static-site-generators and in particular, Astro, so I deployed a theme and the latest Astro build into a Cloudflare pages account and we had a site pretty quickly.
- I asked ChatGPT for a sketch of a bride giving a thumbs up to be used as the primary graphic on the website.
- Developed a form using Tally.
- Setup the domain name on my Amazon Simple Email Service account.
- Sent the form to a Zapier zap which prompted ChatGPT with the below prompt and sends the requester an email.
Write in Australian English only. No emojis. No html. No markdown. Plain text only. Use friendly and honest words. Only reply with the requested text, no extra or explanatory text. Act as an SEO-aware content writer and you are helping wedding brides and grooms write reviews for their wedding vendors.
Only reply with the plain text to be used in the online review.
Generate a helpful and encouraging review that will enhance the wedding vendor’s online presence using this information.
Will it fly?
It would be amazing to build this out to a system where Vendor A can send a unoque link and the generated review is made available to be one-click-shared on Google reviews and other platforms.
I’d also like to …
- remove Zapier from the equation by doing some actual code instead of no-code. I have no idea how to do this yet.
- explore if there is at all a monetisation opportunity. There is currently a small financial cost to me in running the service, minimal today, but if it reached a certain threshold I’d need to investigate financials.
- consider building out pages for vendors so they get a unique link for themselves and maybe they can customise the prompt, and offer one-click posting of the review after it’s generated.
- make it so people use it, so feedback is welcome.
Consider this an invitation to give the system a fly and your feedback is welcome!
