How to run your business by talking to it
Most people click around Aquarius for five or ten minutes before they discover they could have just asked for what they wanted. Here is what asking gets you, in the words two customers used.
Zachary Sheldon4 min read
We watch how people use Aquarius in their first session, and the same thing happens almost every time. Someone signs in and spends five or ten minutes scrolling, opening folders and hunting for the button that does the thing. Then they type one sentence into the chat, get what they were after, and stop hunting.
Those five or ten minutes are our fault, not theirs. So here is the part nobody tells you on the way in.
First, three names, because they get used interchangeably and they should not be. Aquarius is the platform your work lives in. Aqua is who you talk to, by voice or by typing. The Knowledge Map is where everything she has learned about your business is laid out to look at. The rest of this is about the middle one.
Ask for the thing instead of finding it
Sean (not his real name) runs a consulting practice with five projects across two continents. Every report he has commissioned is filed in the right project folder, which is exactly as useful as it sounds at nine in the morning when you cannot remember what you called it.
He presses the call button and says it out loud:
Hey Aqua, can you pull up that report you wrote yesterday about hiring a Facebook ad strategist for the Ecuador project?
It lands in the chat. He did not have to remember the filename, the folder, or which of the five projects it sat in. He remembered what it was about, which is the only part anybody actually remembers.
Then keep going from there
The report recommended a provider. Normally that is where the tab-opening starts. Instead:
Your report mentioned a marketing agency called Ladder. Look up reviews and case studies on them, and create a spreadsheet to track the results alongside other options.
The spreadsheet gets filed in the same project folder, so it is there later whether he clicks his way back to it or asks for it by name.
Editing works the same way. Sean read the report, decided he had been too conservative, and said:
Take that Facebook ad report and raise the budget from $100 to $200, then update it.
No opening the document, no scrolling to the figure, no re-export.
The version of this that happens on your feet
Cathy runs a handmade clothing shop that also sells knitting supplies. Her Aquarius is connected to Clover and Shopify, so it can look up SKUs, change prices, check stock and put together order forms. She is on the shop floor all day, which means she is almost never near the computer that does any of that.
A customer asks when a sold-out item is coming back. Cathy takes out her phone:
Hey Aqua, when did we file that order for more red yarn, and what’s the typical wait time from the supplier?
The customer gets the answer while still standing there. That is the whole feature. No walk to the back office, no “let me check and get back to you”.
What happens when it gets something wrong
It will, sometimes. The boundary is the same one that governs everything else Aqua does: she reads, drafts and researches on her own, and nothing reaches another human until you have seen it.
When to talk, and when to click
Speaking is not better than looking. It is better at one specific thing and worse at others, and the split is fairly clean.
Talking wins when you already know what you want and the whole cost is in navigating to it. Sean’s report. Cathy’s supplier lead time. A budget figure you want changed from one number to another. The sentence is already in your head, so saying it is the shortest distance between the sentence and the result.
Looking wins when you do not yet know what you want. Comparing options in Sean’s spreadsheet, scanning stock for what is running low, reading the Knowledge Map to see what Aqua has understood about the business. Judgement needs things side by side, and a chat reply is a poor place to put them.
The commands are not the hard part, and there is no list of them to learn. Neither Sean nor Cathy was taught one. The hard part is the reflex we watch in those first ten minutes: going to look for a button before saying what you want.
Aquarius is in private beta. If you’d like to try it, request access below.