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ReadyRing: An AI Voice Receptionist for Local Service Businesses

Founder & Lead Engineer · Lightspeed Labs · 2025 – present
Next.js 16 TypeScript AWS (SST v4, Lambda, CloudFront) PostgreSQL / Prisma AWS Cognito Retell AI Stripe Telnyx PostHog

The problem

Local service businesses (plumbers, dentists, salons, HVAC, lawn care) live and die by the phone. A missed call is usually a missed customer, and most owners are on a job, not at a desk. Hiring a receptionist is expensive; generic voicemail loses the lead. The gap is a phone agent that answers every call, sounds professional, and actually does something with the conversation: it books the appointment, captures the lead, and tells the owner what happened.

What I built

ReadyRing is an AI voice receptionist paired with a business-owner dashboard. It answers inbound calls 24/7, handles natural conversation, books appointments and captures lead details, then notifies the owner and logs everything for review. It’s the first SaaS product from Lightspeed Labs, sold self-serve to local businesses.

As founder and lead engineer, I own the product end to end: architecture, the voice pipeline, the dashboard, billing, notifications, and infrastructure.

Approach & architecture

  • Voice pipeline: inbound calls run through Retell AI, with webhooks into the app that process each call, extract structured outcomes (appointment, lead, message), and trigger follow-up actions.
  • App: Next.js 16 (App Router) with cleanly separated route groups (public marketing, authenticated dashboard, onboarding wizard, and customer-facing pages), so the marketing site, the product, and the setup flow share one codebase without bleeding into each other.
  • Auth: AWS Cognito, verified client-side and via server-side JWT checks.
  • Data: PostgreSQL through Prisma, in a shared monorepo database package.
  • Billing: Stripe subscriptions plus metered/usage billing, driven by webhooks.
  • Notifications: owner alerts and a morning digest; recipient SMS verification via Telnyx OTP (generated and validated app-side), transactional email via Resend.
  • Infra: SST v4 deploying to AWS (CloudFront + Lambda) in us-east-1, with scheduled EventBridge crons for the digest, retry notifications, and billing.
  • Analytics: PostHog for product analytics.

Outcome

ReadyRing runs in production at readyring.ai as a self-serve product: a business can sign up, complete a guided setup in minutes, and have an AI agent answering their calls the same day. It’s the first building block of a broader AI operating system for local businesses that Lightspeed Labs is assembling tool by tool.

Stack

Next.js 16 · TypeScript · AWS (SST v4, Lambda, CloudFront) · PostgreSQL / Prisma · AWS Cognito · Retell AI · Stripe · Telnyx · PostHog