Story
Suji makes a physical sign, and the conversation that starts when someone taps it.
The name
In Japanese, 筋 — suji — is the thread of a story. Written differently, 数字, it is the figures in a ledger.
We liked that the same sound carries both, because the product lives exactly where they meet. A guest taps a sign and has a conversation — a thread. The owner opens a dashboard the next morning and reads it back as numbers. Nothing is added between the two. The figures are just the conversations, counted.
Where it started
A queue outside a restaurant, on a cold night in Mystic.
Twenty people waiting to find out three things: how long, what is good, and whether there is anything they can actually eat. Inside, a room full of staff who knew all three answers and no way to be in two places at once.
The obvious fix is a menu on a QR code, and it does not work. A menu is a document; a question is a conversation. Nobody standing in the cold wants to scroll a PDF — they want to ask someone whether the noodles are worth the wait.
So we built the thing that answers, and put it inside an object good enough to stand at the door of a restaurant that cares how it looks. Then we discovered the part we had not planned for: once you are answering every question, you have a list of every question. And the list of the ones you could not answer turns out to be the most valuable document a small business has never had.
How we build
- The object comes first.
- Software that lives on a shelf gets ignored. We started with the sign because a guest has to see something before they can use anything, and because a well-made object earns a kind of trust an app never will.
- Describing, not configuring.
- Owners should feel like they are describing their business, not training a model. There are no intents to map, no flows to draw, and no prompt engineering. You write down what you serve and how you want to sound.
- Say the useful thing, or hand it to a person.
- A host that guesses about an allergy is worse than no host at all. Ours is briefed to be genuinely helpful about the menu and to pass anything contractual, medical, or unusual straight to your staff.
- The questions are the product.
- Answering guests is the visible half. The half that changes a business is the record of what they asked — especially the things nobody could answer.