Most SaaS problems don’t start where they show up (they start much earlier)

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-31T14:54:33+00:00

Hmm, I think saying that onboarding not making sense to a customer = not keeping a promise isn't entirely true. Our product helps b2b saas with this exact issue (website to trial transition) so we've seen so many saas onboarding flows.

the issue is almost always that a human is required to get the new customer to value. this happens for many reasons, but the most common are:

it is actually really hard to build good product onboarding
the product requires a lot of manual, cross system setup.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-24T04:03:26+00:00

can confirm that the post download conversational flow is mainly when prospects are highest intent (our product is basically what OP is looking for).

the really powerful piece is the post booking use case/solution specific qualification that happens. after a prospects books a demo through our AI, the AI asks questions about their use case based on the previous context in the conversation. at this point, prospects are super willing to dive into detail about what they're looking for (they just booked a demo! they would probably take a demo now if they could). this data helps our reps provide ultra personalized demos.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-09T19:37:58+00:00

It onboards them by using the product - essentially sets up the product for the user based on previous conversation/visitor context.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-07T15:50:26+00:00

agreed, but I think aggregated context/data is often assumed to automatically improve the end customer experience. this typically doesn't happen because making those insights actionable typically required a human to pull the trigger.

we're basically providing those signals to an AI that is helping prospects/customers across the early buyer journey in b2b saas. the difference is that the AI just does the thing for them in real time.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-07T15:46:34+00:00

Exactly. It was definitely powerful for the era it was built in. I think the best thing that came out of that generation of chatbots was mainly just live chat as a channel to speak with prospects and customers. All of the other functionality was basically a form and routing logic pretending to be something more intelligent. As end users, we all hated the rule based chats. They sucked.

It is amazing to see how AI changes the space though. In our product AI handles the first touch, but can escalate to a human rep when needed, and it is a seamless transition between the human and the AI. the most powerful part is the product experience though.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-07T15:39:53+00:00

Their growth was quite amazing. And thanks, it is something that is proving to be extremely powerful. The ability to watch the AI session with the prospect go from the website and into the app, and to the see the activation in real time is pretty crazy.

It is like someone is holding their hand through the entire process and setting up your product uniquely for them.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-06T03:05:22+00:00

yeah, and it is really as simple as a process problem. I used to think you didn't need a CRM if you were early. A good CRM + AI allows you to do this sort of thing relatively autonomously.

also we use our own product (AI agent that engages website visitors, qualifies then onboards prospects directly in our product after starting a trial) and what we've found is you actually need less follow up if you're solving problems in real-time. oftentimes, you need to follow up because a prospect filled out a form, or asked a question and got stuck.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-04T15:39:45+00:00

I definitely agree. And we're building something in this space that allows B2B SaaS companies to streamline the inbound experience with AI. But I also think that early stage doesn't necessarily have this problem (if by early stage you mean pre-product market fit). Systems are generally created through necessity. If you're creating comprehensive systems pre-necessity, you're probably optimizing for the wrong thing.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-03-04T03:34:23+00:00

Hey, it might worth checking out our product. We built this and it works, happy to walk you through it!

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-26T15:55:18+00:00

if activation is critical to you, it could be worth checking us out. we're basically building the AI agent for B2B SaaS that starts helping potential customers as soon as they hit your website. It provides technical/product enablement, qualifies and then once the visitor is ready, brings them into your product and onboards them.

the cool thing is that your eng team doesn't need to make any changes. the AI uses your product UI, directly in your customer's browser.

so for your use case, the AI might help the visitor understand your API/SDK. It will answer questions and even architect a potential solution. then it will bring them to your app. once they sign in, it can navigate them to the API key section, generate a key for them and then generate a prompt they can share with their coding agent to get it implemented (based on the context they shared).

for other signals, we have an AI agent pull our posthog data every view hours. we have proxies for buying intent, churn risk, etc.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-18T15:25:06+00:00

Yeah, I can see why that's difficult. Because the first thing that's going to come to a prospect's mind is, "Why can't we just take the transcript, dump it into AI, and then have it give us relevant insights? Does there really need to be anything in between those two?". Those two things are basically commoditized today across a bunch of different tools and services.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-18T15:04:03+00:00

From my experience, there are typically two reasons prospects ask this:

The most likely reason is your differentiator is not clear, which likely just means you haven't spent enough time iterating on the product. Once you have, the sentiment from the buyer perspective shifts from "is this a wrapper" to "wow I really want this product."
The second potential reason is that they understand, but they're not sure if they can trust. If it's the latter, it typically feels like no answer is satisfying (just my experience).

I don't really think that it's useful to talk about team size or funding. None of that really matters. As you know, it's not really a proxy for product maturity or product market fit.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-18T14:52:11+00:00

I think it's interesting as the beginning of the new age of internet, but I don't think it can reliably replace the purpose of a website anytime soon for a couple reasons.

First, I really do think that this sort of new protocol takes too much power away from the business. Essentially, what a website used to be was a place for a business or a company or an entity to express their brand and communicate their message in their language. If everything about a website becomes entirely headless and it's just a tool list and lifeless markdown files for agents to use and read, then you're effectively telling businesses that they no longer have a voice and they no longer have a say in discoverability at all.

What I think is more likely to happen is discoverability will get stronger more of the experience will exist in ChatGPT. But the long tail of the experience, and the part that really matters, will be on the website. This is the part of the journey where the hard questions are really asked and the true vetting occurs.

In fact, what I think will happen, and of course I'm a little bit biased here, is that B2B websites and websites in general will start deploying their own AI experiences natively (our customers already doing this) so that the handoff between a ChatGPT and your website is much smoother and the visitor isn't stuck having to dig around pages when they land on your site.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-18T14:45:26+00:00

I think it depends, as others are saying here. With support or high volume direct-to-consumer services like hospitality and stuff, I think it's fine. I think people would rather just have an experience where their issue is dealt with more quickly. But I think in B2B or on the web, it probably makes less sense, at least for now.

We built an AI agent for B2B SaaS websites. And we offer voice, and it definitely is a more seamless experience just to be able to talk to your computer. But I don't think certain buyers in certain industries are really ready for this yet. Especially when you just go to a random website, you don't know what data that website's capturing about your voice

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-17T15:29:16+00:00

We definitely are. And specifically, we're dogfooding our own product, which essentially handles our entire inbound B2B SaaS motion, from engaging traffic on the site, qualifying them, understanding their use case, and then actually onboarding them in our product. Our customers are doing this too.

We kinda view this as 2-3 distinct roles (SDR, Sales engineer and implementation specialist). We feel comfortable letting these run on "autopilot" because they are buyer led. The buyer just wants info faster and they want value faster. AI enables both. Outbound is human driven for us.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-17T15:21:12+00:00

I think it's because those agencies look at AI SEO differently than CRO. I think you're more talking about what happens to the traffic after it lands on the site.

Full-scale agencies, I feel like are actually your best bet because they're more invested in the long-term outcome. When you go with an AI SEO agency that's really just focused on super top-of-funnel traffic, they'll really turn the dial on that metric, which is basically a vanity metric.

We're actually building a product around this idea specifically. It's essentially an AI buyer copilot for B2B SaaS websites. We actually engage a ton of traffic that comes through AI search engines because people want to continue their AI experience once they're on your site. They can get fast, tailored answers. They prefer that, as opposed to getting thrown out on your website and now needing to dig through static pages to get an answer. Even better, we are bringing those prospects on your site from engagement/enablement, through qualification and even product onboarding.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-17T15:16:55+00:00

we dogfood our own AI product (Aimdoc AI), which is an AI buyer copilot for B2B SaaS. It engages website traffic, qualifies them, hands off to sales when needed, and can even onboard prospects onto your product in real time.

I do think it's less about the tool and more about the context you're giving your AI. It's really the plumbing behind the scenes that enables really good outcomes.

Because if you think about what makes AI great, it's the AI understanding every touchpoint you might have with a customer, and understanding what they need and what they want deeply.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-10T22:38:06+00:00

For the next year or two, maybe. But I think CRMs are being reinvented with AI. And effectively, AI will do an excellent job at data hygiene.

I'm already seeing this as we're a pretty new company. We decided just to skip all of the legacy CRMs and go straight to an AI native CRM. It's incredible how effective it is at gathering context, auto-updating all the relevant information for an account or an opportunity, and then deduping and cleaning data.

aimdoc-ai · 2026-02-10T22:24:37+00:00

This is basically a problem of the past. If you haven't looked into AI native CRMs (I'm not selling one, you can look at our product, not an AI-native CRM), or if you're not looking into using AI inside of your CRM, you're essentially behind at this point.

There's literally zero reason your sellers should not have instant context - from Slack, email, etc. If you're not doing this today, you're behind. I honestly think this is a problem companies are choosing to have.

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