When I was a motion picture literary agent in Beverly Hills, I averaged two hundred calls or more a day. My assistant fielded each one, booked meetings, and was the traffic controller keeping the planes from colliding. In 2015, it seemed incredibly efficient. Today, not so much.
After I stepped out of the corporate airlock and into the vacuum of entrepreneurship, hiring a salaried personal assistant didn’t make sense economically. I experimented with part-time contractors and outsourced call services like Ruby Receptionists. In every scenario, the experience was subpar at best. Before too long, I found myself trying to migrate all my comms to text and email, which worked for some callers but wasn’t appropriate for others.
Then came the challenge of finding assistants I could actually trust. If you run a business in California, you live the nightmare of navigating a decade-long explosion of upside-down labor law. Some of these regulations were absolutely necessary and genuinely reflect why California leads the country in employee protection. Many others, however, made the ayatollah of Iran look like a hall monitor in comparison. As a small business owner, employing in-house assistants became a minefield.
The Long Game
Like every founder, you fake it until you make it and fill in the gaps whenever you’re not passed out from exhaustion. I kept telling myself that if margins increased 10% or if revenue stayed consistent enough, I'd hire the right person eventually. Guess what? Startup wizardry and financial consistency operate in parallel universes that never intersect. Then for a while I thought I’d just overpay for someone great. With enough experience, you realize the high-paid executive assistant isn’t all that different from the entry-level version.
By my third startup, I thought I was doing everything right. Calendly for scheduling, Gusto for HR and private recruiting firms for new hires. And I disciplined myself to follow every voicemail with a quick email explaining the reason for my call. Before long, I changed that to never leaving a voicemail at all.
But incoming calls still remained a nightmare, and burnout reared its ugly head. I went through my esoteric phase: why do I even need to answer? Looking back, ignoring my phone for three months was one of the most liberating things I ever did. It only made sense to drop social media too. Expunging a fifteen-plus-year digital footprint no doubt put years back on my life—but was this too extreme? Would I buy stamps and mail letters too?
Telephonic Hijacking
As a business owner, you've likely started using your personal cell phone for calls and texts. That means your personal number, name, and other information get saved to hundreds of databases around the world. Before long, you're receiving thirty calls a day from random salespeople, surveys, and scammers. This is still vivid for me. Every night, I had to delete all my voicemails because they kept maxing out my iPhone.
I tried everything to get people to stop calling me. I paid services to delist me from databases. I turned my phone to silent all the time. Some days I just gave up and let my voicemail max out to stop the calls. But nothing worked. I felt powerless. The only option I thought I had left was to ditch my personal number altogether and start clean. But I came to my senses when I realized my phone number and identity are linked. This isn’t up for debate since I’m a Zillennial. I grew up in an era where you actually memorized someone’s phone number, every digit, because your brain was the original Contacts app. This concept is so foreign today it might as well be a lost ritual from a vanished civilization.
Data Broker Fiasco
Over the last three years, data brokers around the world have proliferated at a rate never seen before. AI call-factory innovation dramatically reduced call-origination costs internationally. Routing systems that support spam calls at scale once required custom infrastructure, but today these systems can be purchased off the shelf for pennies. Foreign companies exploit loopholes in antiquated state and federal law. The FCC is losing its whack-a-mole war as the cost of launching new spammer farms become negligible. Crypto-funded ops have only made this worse.
The result? A perfect storm. Legitimate business owners like you and me end up paying the price for a global spam-industrial complex we never signed up for. Your number gets scraped, sold, repackaged, and resold like a knockoff handbag in a back-alley market. And every time a new spammer farm spins up in some overseas data center, your phone becomes their favorite chew toy. It’s exhausting. You can’t block the calls fast enough, and even when you do, ten more pop up hydra-style to take their place. At some point, you stop feeling annoyed and start feeling hunted by your own phone.
Meanwhile, you’re running a business. You can’t ignore the phone entirely because somewhere in that mess is an existing client. No problem. That’s what caller ID is for. But what if it’s a new customer? That means screening with voicemail is no longer an option. This became miserable purgatory: half gatekeeper, half spam bouncer. What an incredible waste of time! Why is this happening?
Why I Created Sloane
When I accepted defeat in my cage match with robocallers, I realized I needed to stop punishing myself simply because I was a small business. After all, small businesses make up 99.9% of all businesses in the United States (yes, that’s actually true). A small business shouldn’t have to pay for call services or expensive staff to handle phones! For lack of a better word, it’s just stupid.
What if I could use AI to make a reliable, easy-to-use call assistant that was actually good? What if I could create a receptionist that answered instantly, sounded human, had flawless memory, understood context, booked appointments, screened out junk, handled FAQs, and didn’t require salaries, benefits, HR, compliance, or a California labor lawyer on speed dial?
So, I started building Sloane. Not as a gimmick. Not as another AI toy. But as a necessary correction to a broken system every small business simply tolerates because they think they have no alternative.
I wasn’t a coder. But vibe coding was a thing, so I tried that. That got me a prototype. Not good enough, so I taught myself how to code. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. While testing early prototypes of Sloane, the results were promising. Calls were being answered instantly. Customers were actually thanking “her” for being so helpful. Appointment bookings increased because people no longer landed in my voicemail canyon. Spam calls were quietly filtered out without ever touching my phone. And for the first time in my career, my phone wasn’t an anxiety machine.
10 users became 100 users… which became 500 users… then 1,000 users. Wait, what? Businesses were actually using it! Were they faced with the same problem?
Incoming calls no longer felt like hostile missiles on a radar screen. Space opened up again: mental, emotional, and entrepreneurial. When small fires popped up, the bandwidth was finally there to put them out. My telephonic umbilical was severed. Lunches became peaceful instead of filled with the dreadful sense that something was slipping through the cracks. Suddenly, I had an assistant again. I once was lost but now I am found
Customers Actually Loved It
And here’s the part nobody expected: customers preferred it. I ran surveys. I listened to call transcripts. We watched behavior trends. Across the board, customers engaged. They asked questions. They were thankful when they received information. They treated her as if she was an assistant from my bygone Hollywood era.
We’re trained to believe the “human touch” is always superior. But that’s only true when the human is at their best. Most receptionists aren’t at their best 24/7—no one is. AI doesn’t get tired, hungry, annoyed, stressed, flustered, or overwhelmed. It doesn’t have off days. And it doesn’t accidentally hang up on people.
So the stigma disappeared. Customers didn’t care that Sloane was AI. They cared that their problem was solved. It turns out that a virtual receptionist that provides the same or more value than a human is all the same to a caller.
The Future
AI doesn’t replace people. It replaces the parts of running a business that nobody should be doing.
Screening calls. Repeating FAQs. Booking appointments. Catching spam. Taking messages. Asking basic qualification questions. Coordinating schedules.
Nothing about these tasks requires a human being. They require accuracy, speed, memory, and flawless repetition. Does AI make mistakes? All the time. But so do humans.
Stop settling for the old way of doing things. Stop paying for employees or call services. And stop answering your own phone! This is the way.
Sloane isn’t here to eliminate jobs. She’s here to eliminate friction. I wish I had this five years ago. Phone calls seem like the last frontier of business modernization. Everything else has evolved: payments, marketing, sales, scheduling, customer communication, analytics, payroll, logistics. But the phone? It’s stayed exactly the same until now.
If email had Mailchimp, If support had Zendesk, If websites had Shopify, If scheduling had Calendly,
Phone calls now have Sloane.
