2026-05-12
I built Replai because I was drowning in my own WhatsApp inbox
The first version of Replai was a hack I built to keep my own small business afloat. Then I realised every other small-business owner in SEA had the same problem.
This isn't an "I had an idea on a flight" story. This is an "I had a problem I could not get out from under" story.
What I was running before
A small e-commerce business. Phone accessories, mostly — cases, charms, screen protectors. Sold on the website, through a couple of retail partners, and over WhatsApp.
WhatsApp was the channel that mattered. Customers found us through Instagram or word-of-mouth, and the second they had a question — do you have iPhone 17 Pro cases in stock? Is the magnetic charm compatible with X? Can I get free shipping over RM 100? — they pinged WhatsApp.
By the time the store was doing real volume, I was answering 80–150 WhatsApp messages a day. Same questions. Same screenshots. Same voice notes from older customers asking the same thing about MagSafe.
I was answering at 11pm. I was answering at 6am. I was answering while driving (badly). My partner was answering for me when I was on a call. The store was growing, and the support inbox was the bottleneck — not the product, not the marketing, the inbox.
The first hack
I'd been building with the Anthropic API for unrelated things. One night I wired up a quick prototype: pull the recent WhatsApp messages, feed them to Claude with a system prompt about my products and prices, generate a reply.
It worked. Embarrassingly well. The questions are repetitive — do you have this colour, is this in stock, when does shipping arrive, can I get a discount — and Claude grounded in our product sheet answered correctly the first time, every time.
Within a week the bot was handling about 70% of inbound. The 30% that needed me were the actually interesting messages: a wholesale enquiry, a damaged-shipment complaint, a custom request. The repetitive 70% were gone.
I got my evenings back.
When I realised it was a product
I told some other small-business owners about it. A tuition centre operator who was answering parent enquiries at midnight. A friend running a Raya promo who needed to capture contest entries by photo. A florist whose voice-note inbox was full of orders she couldn't transcribe fast enough.
Same problem. Same channel. Same shape of solution. And none of them were going to write Python and call the Anthropic API to fix it.
So I started turning the hack into a real product. Pairing flow that doesn't need code (a QR scan). Knowledge base that accepts a PDF or a Google Doc URL. Templates so a tuition centre owner doesn't have to write a system prompt from scratch. Outbound campaigns with ban-safe rate limiting because someone was going to want that. A safety-net classifier that flags complaints so you don't accidentally let one fester.
That's Replai now.
What I'm building toward
The honest pitch is: everything an inbox-only customer-support team would do — without the team. Pair your number, drop in your business knowledge, let it answer the predictable 70% so you can spend your time on the 30% that actually needs you.
If you're an owner-operator running a small business in SEA and your WhatsApp inbox is eating your evenings, Replai is built for you. It's the tool I wished existed when I was the one drowning in receipts and voice notes at 11pm.
7-day free trial. No credit card, no API key. Pair in 30 seconds. Let me know if it does for you what it did for me.