eLLMo is short for Easy LLM Optimization. The spelling is for our daughters.

The name comes up on almost every first call, usually right before someone asks how to spell it. So here is the whole story, both halves of it.

The short version

eLLMo is short for Easy LLM Optimization.

LLM stands for large language model. That is the technology behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and the other assistants your customers now ask before they buy anything. Optimization is the work of making sure those models can find your business, read it correctly, and say something accurate about it when a shopper asks.

Easy is the word we argued about the longest. It is also the only one that decides what the company builds.

Easy is the product, not the tone

Good AI is not scarce anymore. Anyone can open a browser and talk to a model that would have looked like science fiction a few years ago. Access stopped being the hard part.

Knowing what to do with it is the hard part, and that is where the split shows up.

A large brand answers the question with headcount. It hires a data team, a search team, an agency, and someone whose entire job is reading release notes from model companies. A small business has a founder who is also the buyer, the customer service desk, the person writing the product copy, and the person closing the books on a Sunday night.

Both businesses are living through the same change. Customers are asking an assistant what to buy instead of scrolling through a page of blue links. Only one of those businesses has a team standing by to respond to it.

If the best AI only works for companies that can hire a team to run it, the technology is not finished.

That gap is the company. Easy is not a brand voice for us, it is the specification. If an owner cannot get a real answer out of eLLMo in an afternoon, without hiring anyone and without a data project, then we have not built the thing we named.

Small business is not a segment we picked off a chart

Entrepreneurship is the backbone of this country, and that is not a figure of speech. The SBA's Office of Advocacy counts 36.2 million small businesses in the United States, which is 99.9% of all American businesses. They employ 62.3 million people, close to half of everyone working in the private sector, and they make up 43.5% of GDP.

It also runs deep in our own family. Ours has run restaurants, retail stores, and fertilizer businesses. So we did not learn what a small business asks of a household from a case study. We learned it at home, from people who worked for themselves and were counting on it working.

Armando spent years at Gusto leading growth and AI engineering, building payroll and benefits software for exactly these businesses. More than 500,000 of them run on it now. When payroll has to go out on Friday and there is nobody in the building whose job is software, you find out quickly what easy has to mean.

That is the reason the tools we build have to reach further down than the enterprise tier. The businesses that need this most are the ones with the least slack to go and get it. When the technology only lands at the top, the gap between a company with an AI team and a company without one stops being a gap and turns into a wall.

And then there is Elmo

Our daughters love Elmo. Our family grew up with the show and still has a soft spot for it, so when the acronym turned out to sound like his name, that settled it. It was a fun one for the family to enjoy.

That is one of the real perks of running your own business. You get to name it whatever you want.

The letters still have to mean something, though. Someone who runs their business on their own should be able to sign up, point us at one of their pages, and get something useful back the same day. That is the part we have to keep earning.

Start free and run it on your own product page, or see a live run first.

*Related Links: Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business (SBA Office of Advocacy), Gusto surpasses $1 billion in revenue (Gusto), About eLLMo, Discovery has left your website. The data on where it went., What makes an AI agent pick your brand.*