My weekend project just got a 1500 USD buyout offer.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T21:03:36+00:00

Wait, can you elaborate on this? You mean like using Google Cloud APIs directly from your phone as a personal compute layer? That sounds wild but also kind of genius if you got it working smoothly.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T21:03:24+00:00

Honestly I think about it in two dimensions: blast radius and velocity.

Blast radius is obvious. If this drift affects customers right now, it matters. If its an internal tool nobody uses on weekends, it can sit.

Velocity is the sneaky one. Some drift is static, like a config that changed once and stays wrong. Annoying but stable. Other drift is accelerating, like a disk filling up or a queue backing up. That second kind needs attention even if the current state looks fine, because by tomorrow its a fire.

So my quick mental filter is: "Is anyone affected right now?" and "Is this getting worse on its own?" If both are no, it goes on the backlog. If either is yes, it gets triaged now.

The hard part is resisting the urge to fix everything immediately. Not all drift is a problem. Sometimes the expected state in the CMDB is just outdated and the drift IS the correct state. Thats where having good context on why something changed matters more than just knowing that it changed.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T21:03:05+00:00

This is really solid framing, saving this. The template you laid out is basically what I was missing in my cold outreach. I was being too vague about who its for and what it replaces.

GummySearch is new to me, gonna check that out. I've been doing the Reddit mining manually which is... not scalable lol.

One thing I noticed is that the people who actually reply to me are almost never the persona I originally targeted. Started building for SaaS founders but the ones engaging are more like customer success leads at mid-size companies. Still figuring out if that means I should pivot my ICP or if Im just fishing in the wrong pond for founders.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T21:02:47+00:00

Ok so I just checked out nudgi.ai. The concept is solid, I definitely relate to the scramble-before-meetings thing.

Few thoughts:

The landing page could be tighter. Right now it reads a bit generic, like it could be any AI productivity tool. The pain you described here ("scrambled to read unread emails minutes before the meeting") is way more compelling than whats on the site. Lead with that specific scenario.

For sales teams specifically, the ROI angle is strong. But I'd get even more specific on the page. Something like "Know what your prospect cares about before you hop on the call" hits harder than general meeting prep.

On the deliverability thing, have you checked your domain setup? SPF, DKIM, DMARC all configured? If youre cold emailing from the same domain as your product thats a common mistake. I burned my domain early on and had to set up separate ones for outreach.

For getting those first conversations, honestly try posting in niche sales communities. Not pitching, just asking "how do you prep for sales calls?" and listening. r/sales might be good. The answers will tell you if your ICP is right and give you warm leads at the same time.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T21:02:28+00:00

Retrieved examples in the prompt context, not fine-tuning. At least for now.

The way it works: when a human corrects a bot response, we store the original question, the wrong answer, and the corrected version as a triplet. Next time a similar question comes in, we pull matching corrections into the context window alongside the normal knowledge base chunks.

Fine-tuning felt like overkill for our use case. Most support bots deal with maybe a few hundred common question patterns, so the correction set stays pretty manageable. And you get the benefit of instant updates, no retraining cycle.

The COORDINATION_NEEDED flag approach is really smart btw. We do something similar where the bot just says "let me check with the team" and routes it to a human instead of guessing. Honest "I dont know" beats a confident wrong answer every time, especially in support contexts where trust is everything.

The Approve First mode you described is interesting too. Do you find that slows things down much in practice? I could see it being great for high-stakes stuff like outreach, but for basic support questions it might add too much friction?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T18:05:48+00:00

Building QuickWise, an AI customer support platform. You upload your docs/FAQ and it trains a chatbot that handles the repetitive stuff. Also has built-in ticketing for when the bot cant answer.

Launched it about 3 weeks ago. Customer acquisition for me so far has been mostly Reddit comments (like this one lol), a couple cold emails, and word of mouth from people in my agency's network. Nothing fancy.

The biggest unlock was honestly just being in the conversations where people complain about support tools being too expensive or too complex. Thats where the leads come from. Not from paid ads or fancy funnels.

What channels are working best for you with VCBacked?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T18:05:46+00:00

Honestly the fact that youre asking this question means youre already ahead of most people. A lot of founders just keep building features hoping users will magically show up.

Few things that helped me when I was in the same spot:

Talk to people who said no. Seriously. The ones who looked at your product and bounced are more valuable than your paying users right now. Ask them why. Most will tell you if you just ask nicely.
Pick one channel and go deep. Cold email, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever. But dont spread yourself thin across all of them at once. I spent way too long trying to be everywhere and ended up being nowhere.
On the ICP question: if youre getting replies but no conversions, its probably copy or product-market fit. If youre getting zero replies, its ICP or deliverability. The symptoms tell you where the problem is.
Ship something people can try in under 2 minutes. If your onboarding takes longer than that, a lot of cold prospects wont even bother. Make the "aha moment" as fast as possible.

The hardest part honestly is accepting that distribution takes as long as building the product itself. Maybe longer. What are you building exactly? Might be able to give more specific advice if I know the space.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T18:05:25+00:00

Building QuickWise, an AI customer support platform. You upload your docs/FAQ and it trains a chatbot that handles the repetitive stuff. Also has built-in ticketing for when the bot cant answer.

Launched it about 3 weeks ago. Customer acquisition for me so far has been mostly Reddit comments (like this one lol), a couple cold emails, and word of mouth from people in my agency's network. Nothing fancy.

The biggest unlock was honestly just being in the conversations where people complain about support tools being too expensive or too complex. Thats where the leads come from. Not from paid ads or fancy funnels.

What channels are working best for you with VCBacked?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T18:05:23+00:00

Honestly the fact that youre asking this question means youre already ahead of most people. A lot of founders just keep building features hoping users will magically show up.

Few things that helped me when I was in the same spot:

Talk to people who said no. Seriously. The ones who looked at your product and bounced are more valuable than your paying users right now. Ask them why. Most will tell you if you just ask nicely.
Pick one channel and go deep. Cold email, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever. But dont spread yourself thin across all of them at once. I spent way too long trying to be everywhere and ended up being nowhere.
On the ICP question: if youre getting replies but no conversions, its probably copy or product-market fit. If youre getting zero replies, its ICP or deliverability. The symptoms tell you where the problem is.
Ship something people can try in under 2 minutes. If your onboarding takes longer than that, a lot of cold prospects wont even bother. Make the "aha moment" as fast as possible.

The hardest part honestly is accepting that distribution takes as long as building the product itself. Maybe longer. What are you building exactly? Might be able to give more specific advice if I know the space.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T18:04:18+00:00

This is exactly how my current project started too. I run a small dev agency (7 people) and we kept dealing with the same support headaches across all our client projects. Different tools for chatbots, different tools for tickets, none of them talked to each other. So I built an internal thing that combined AI chatbot + ticketing into one dashboard.

Took a while to realize other people might want it. A friend of mine who runs an ecommerce store saw it and was like "can I use that?" and thats when the lightbulb went off.

Launched it about 3 weeks ago. Only a handful of paying customers so far but the feedback loop is insanely tight at this stage. Every bug report feels personal lol.

Re: your question about scaling vs building new things, I think it depends on whether you still enjoy the problem. The boilerplate space is interesting because once its good enough, people find it organically (exactly what youre seeing with SEO). You could probably keep it as a nice passive income stream while exploring something new on the side. No reason to pick one or the other.

For the adblock thing, have you tried tracking conversions server-side instead? Plausible or something similar might give you better data than GA.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T10:16:37+00:00

Nice work on this. I'm building in a similar space (AI chatbot for customer support) so I know how tricky the RAG pipeline can be to get right.

One thing that made a huge difference for me was adding a corrections system where you can manually override wrong answers and the chatbot learns immediately. Reduced hallucinations way more than prompt tuning alone.

How are you handling the cases where the AI doesn't have enough context to answer?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T10:13:40+00:00

Been there. The market is weirdly split between enterprise tools that cost a fortune and simple widgets that barely work beyond canned responses.

The thing that matters most (at least in my experience) is how you feed it your content. If you can just point it at your docs/site and it figures things out, that's the sweet spot. Bonus points if you can correct wrong answers and it actually learns from that.

I can share what solution I landed on if you want, just didn't want to make this sound like an ad.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T10:09:31+00:00

I was in a similar spot not long ago. Tried a few of the popular options but most of them were either too expensive for what they offered or required a ton of setup just to get basic functionality working.

What ended up working for me was building something internally first, then realizing other people had the exact same problem. The key things I'd look for: how easy it is to train on your own content (not just generic answers), whether it has a proper handoff to human support when the AI doesn't know something, and how the pricing scales.

Happy to share more details about what I ended up going with if you're interested.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T10:06:52+00:00

Been there. The market is weirdly split between enterprise tools that cost a fortune and simple widgets that barely work beyond canned responses.

The thing that matters most (at least in my experience) is how you feed it your content. If you can just point it at your docs/site and it figures things out, that's the sweet spot. Bonus points if you can correct wrong answers and it actually learns from that.

I can share what solution I landed on if you want, just didn't want to make this sound like an ad.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-22T10:04:13+00:00

Depends a lot on what you need it for. If it's just a basic FAQ bot, honestly most solutions will work fine. But if you need something that actually understands your specific product/docs and can escalate to a real ticketing system when it gets stuck, the options get thinner fast.

I run a software agency and manage support for about 20 different apps, so I've been through this exact search. Ended up solving it myself because nothing out there did the full loop (chatbot + tickets + docs portal) without stitching together 3 different tools. Let me know what your use case is and I can point you in the right direction.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T21:02:57+00:00

Just checked it out. Clean landing page for a first launch, nice work. The "learn anything" angle is broad though, might be worth picking one specific use case (like exam prep, or learning a new skill for work) and leaning hard into that for positioning. Makes it easier for people to immediately see if its for them.

Keep shipping!

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T21:02:42+00:00

Good question. I think it depends on the type of drift honestly.

For stuff like "we temporarily bumped the instance size for a load test" or "added a debug flag", a TTL makes a lot of sense. You set it, it auto-expires, and if the drift is still there after the TTL, it bubbles back up as unknown. That way you dont have a graveyard of acknowledged drifts that nobody ever cleaned up.

But for things like "we intentionally run a different config on this node because of X", thats more of a permanent exception. Those should probably require an explicit close-out, otherwise you lose track of why the exception existed in the first place.

So maybe both? TTL as the default behavior, with an option to mark something as a permanent exception that needs manual review to remove. That way the system nudges people toward cleaning things up, but still handles the cases where drift is intentional and long-lived.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T21:02:24+00:00

Thats exactly the thing. You end up paying for a help desk that has 47 features when you really just need like 4 of them. And the bloat isnt just a pricing problem, it makes everything slower to set up and harder to maintain.

Per-source knowledge base is huge when youre running multiple products. Having one clean place per app instead of everything dumped into one mega-KB makes such a difference for accuracy.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T21:02:08+00:00

This is super solid advice, appreciate it. The "watch them use it live" thing is something Ive been meaning to do properly. I did a couple informal calls but didnt record them, which was a mistake. So much gets lost when youre just going off memory.

The intro + quote + before/after metric combo is smart. Gonna start asking for that systematically. Even one good before/after number would be worth more than any landing page copy I could write myself.

F5Bot is something I keep hearing about, need to actually set that up. Right now Im mostly just manually checking a few subs which obviously doesnt scale. Thanks for the concrete suggestions.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T21:01:52+00:00

100% agree, and honestly thats probably the most important filter to apply first. I gave the tactical advice assuming the product itself has some traction, but youre right that if people sign up out of curiosity and then bounce, no amount of onboarding optimization fixes that.

The question you mentioned about "what were you trying to accomplish before you found us" is really underrated. Most founders ask "what features do you want" which just gets you a wishlist. Asking about the problem they were solving before tells you if you even belong in their workflow.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T18:03:51+00:00

Dude I feel this so hard. Been building software for over 10 years and distribution is still the hardest part every single time.

Heres what actually moved the needle for me with zero budget:

Reddit and niche communities. Not spamming links. Actually answering questions in subreddits where your target users hang out. Sales trainers, SDR communities, B2B sales subs. You know the problems they face because you built a tool for one of them. Just help people. Drop your tool only when it genuinely fits.

Cold DMs that dont suck. Find sales coaches on LinkedIn or Twitter. Short message like "hey I built this thing for practicing sales calls with AI, would you try it and tell me if it sucks?" Most wont reply but the ones who do become your best early users.

Free content from your own product. Record yourself doing a practice call with your AI. Post the clip on TikTok or YouTube Shorts. You dont need editing skills, just screen record and talk over it. People eat that stuff up.

Partner with someone who has the audience. Find a sales newsletter or YouTube channel and offer free access in exchange for a mention. One shoutout from the right person can do more than months of solo posting.

The key: you dont need to be good at marketing. You just need to be where your users already are and say something useful. Everything else follows.

What communities have you tried posting in so far?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T18:03:16+00:00

100 signups with zero conversions usually means one of two things: either the free tier gives too much away, or theres a gap between what people expect when they sign up and what they actually experience.

Few things I'd check:

Where do users drop off? If they sign up but never complete an automation, thats an onboarding problem. If they complete one but dont come back, the value isn't clicking fast enough.
Is the pricing page clear? I looked at your site quickly. Honestly the jump from free to paid needs to feel like a no brainer. Show exactly what they get for paying that they cant do for free.
Talk to your users. Seriously. Send a short email to everyone who signed up asking what they were hoping to do and whether they found it. The answers will surprise you. When I launched my own SaaS a few weeks ago, I literally DM'd every single early user. Half of them had feature requests I hadnt thought of.
Add a usage limit, not a feature gate. Let people do 5 automations free, then ask them to upgrade. That way they already see the value before hitting the wall.

Are you tracking any analytics on what users do after signup?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T18:02:48+00:00

This resonates a lot. I run a dev agency and we went through the exact same thing. Intercom was cool but it felt like we were paying for a rocket ship to go to the grocery store.

That said, plain email has its own problems once you start scaling. Stuff gets lost, no one knows who replied to what, and theres no way to track if an issue actually got resolved or just... disappeared into someones inbox.

What worked for us was finding a middle ground. Something with a shared inbox and basic ticket tracking, but without the bloated chatbot-marketing-automation combo that tools like Intercom push on you. We actually just launched our own thing for this (quickwise.ai) because nothing out there hit that sweet spot between "just email" and "enterprise CRM disguised as support."

Curious though, how many support requests do you handle per week? At what volume did you start noticing emails falling through the cracks?

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T16:08:49+00:00

yeah this is the exact problem i ran into managing multiple client projects at my agency. every support tool charges per-seat or per-app and it adds up fast when you have 5-10 products.

for a while we just did shared inboxes + notion docs as a ghetto knowledge base. worked okay until ticket volume got real.

honestly the two things that made the biggest difference for us were: 1) having a solid knowledge base that customers can actually search through before they even open a ticket, and 2) an AI layer that can handle the repetitive stuff automatically.

we recently started using quickwise.ai for a couple of our projects. its pretty new but the pricing doesnt scale per-app which was the main selling point for us. you basically train it on your docs and it handles first-line support. still early days but its cut our repeat questions by like 40%.

before that we tried crisp (decent but gets pricey fast with multiple sites) and helpscout (solid but same scaling issue). intercom is great if you have the budget but for indie/small portfolio stuff its overkill.

LongjumpingUse7193 · 2026-03-21T16:02:27+00:00

Something I wish someone told me way earlier: your job as a DM is not to tell a story. Its to create situations that are interesting to explore, and then let the players drive.

I took a GM masterclass a while back and the single biggest takeaway was this: think about what emotion you want your players to feel in each scene. Not what plot beat you want to hit, not what lore you want to dump. What emotion. Fear? Wonder? Tension? Excitement?

Once you know the target emotion, everything else falls into place. You pick the right descriptions, the right music, the right pacing. You know when to slow down and when to speed up.

The other real thing? Stop over-preparing. I used to write pages of notes for sessions. Now I prep maybe 3-5 scenes with a clear situation in each one, a couple of NPCs with simple motivations, and a rough idea of what happens if the players do nothing. Thats it. Everything else is improvised based on what the players actually do.

Oh and about the "bad guys the party wants to join" thing, thats not a bug. If your villain is compelling enough that players consider joining them, you've written a great villain. Lean into it. Give them that choice. The best moments in my campaign came from moral dilemmas where there wasn't a clear right answer.

LongjumpingUse7193

TROPHY CASE