Our customers love our work. You'd never know it online.

I run a small kitchen installation company. We take our time with customers and do everything we can to give them the best experience. At the end of a job, customers would stand in their new kitchen, tell us how much they loved it, and promise they'd definitely, 100% leave us a review.

Time would pass. I'd sheepishly chase them up and ask if they'd had a chance. It was always the same answer: “So sorry, Ellis! I haven't had time to sit down and think about it, but I'll do it later!” And later usually meant never.

That gap costs more than it looks. The next customer, comparing firms late at night, never hears what that customer told us in the kitchen. They see a handful of short reviews, a tiny fraction of our hundreds of happy customers, and some so generic they could be about anyone.

That's not the customer's fault. It's hard to put everything you think into a review the whole world can read. I get it; I'm guilty of it myself.

So I built Echlo, first and foremost for my own business. Not to squeeze more reviews out of people, but to help the ones who already loved the work say so properly: in their own words, in a few minutes, on the sites the next customer checks.

It works for any business where the job ends with a happy customer. The praise is already there. Echlo helps it travel.

I'm building it in the open with a small group of pilot businesses. If you try it, you'll be talking to me, and I read every email.