About Shelly and Gray Sand Technology

Shelly is built in San Diego by Dan Smith of Gray Sand Technology, who has 26 years in technology and spent ten of them as a senior-level software engineer at Intuit.

Dan Smith

Principal Architect and Product Design Lead, Gray Sand Technology LLC

Dan Smith is a product-minded solutions engineer with 26 years of professional technology experience. He spent ten years as a senior-level software engineer at Intuit, six years in healthcare IT, and four years building fundraising technology for major international nonprofits and corporate giving programs including Hilton Worldwide and Bentley. In 2016 he published BASIC UX in UX Magazine, a framework for testing whether a product is actually usable across five principles: Beauty, Accessibility, Simplicity, Intuitiveness, and Consistency. It has since been documented independently and taught as one of the recognized UX frameworks. He has empathy for end users and wants to see complex problems solved with elegant solutions, which is the whole reason Gray Sand exists.

Creator of BASIC UX. Certified ScrumMaster, Scrum Alliance, 2013. Studied at Oral Roberts University. Career history on LinkedIn.

Who sets up and tunes your agent

The person who sets up your agent is the person who tunes it, and that person is Dan. He takes the intake call, reads your site the way a visitor does, writes the agent's instructions from a plain description of your business, and asks it the twenty questions your front desk answers every day before it goes live. After launch he reads what people asked and what the agent said, and adjusts the instructions and the pages it reads.

There is no support queue between you and the person who wrote the instructions. Email lands with him, and the monthly review is the same person reading the conversations and telling you which pages are worth writing.

Gray Sand Technology, San Diego

Parent company: Gray Sand Technology LLC helps companies use technology to serve and reach their customers. It builds and manages websites for small businesses and connects AI to the systems larger companies already run, and Shelly is its product for answering customers on a website, in an inbox, and in site search. The parent company site is graysandtech.com.
City: San Diego, California. Setup and the monthly review happen over a call, so a client does not have to be local.
Email: hello@graysandtech.com. Every message gets a reply from Dan.