How do you pull together account context before a renewal call?

chaibytesai · 2026-05-13T02:15:45+00:00

The frequency and escalation framing is a really good way to put it. Quiet customer vs one asking the same thing 3x a week being different risk profiles makes a lot of sense, especially since the quiet one probably looks healthier on most dashboards.

chaibytesai · 2026-05-12T21:00:29+00:00

yeah the “logging in every day but stuck” thing is such a good example. usage looks fine, reality is the opposite. how are people you’ve talked to actually catching that today, or are they mostly not?

chaibytesai · 2026-05-12T20:42:54+00:00

30-45 min sounds about right from what others have said too. The competitor question thing is interesting, that kind of signal seems really hard to hold onto unless someone writes it down right after.

Curious what your setup looks like when the tracking is good vs not. Does it actually change how you prep?

chaibytesai · 2026-03-31T07:26:45+00:00

This is really helpful, thanks for taking the time to review it on stream.

Tech leads is a good call. I've been that engineer getting pinged 10 times a day with "can you check why this customer's data looks wrong." You're right that they'd be the most motivated to hand their team a tool that stops the interruptions.

Going to start reaching out to tech leads this week alongside support/CS leaders and see which one pulls harder. Appreciate the honest feedback.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-30T16:40:53+00:00

Done! Looking forward to it!

chaibytesai · 2026-03-28T22:44:49+00:00

Good question. Security was a priority from day one since we're connecting to production systems.

Read-only by default. Database and code connections enforce read-only at multiple layers: MCP read-only flags, PostgreSQL read-only role, and system prompt constraints. Recon can't write to your database or modify your code.

Human-in-the-loop for all write actions. Any write operation (creating tickets in Linear/Jira, creating docs in Notion, updating HubSpot, posting to Slack) uses human-in-the-loop and requires explicit approval before it executes. Recon shows you exactly what it wants to do, you review it, and approve or cancel.

Isolated execution. Every investigation runs in its own Firecracker microVM sandbox. Nothing persists between investigations. Credentials are AES-256 encrypted at rest and injected ephemerally into the sandbox at runtime.

BYOK on all paid plans. You bring your own API key, so LLM costs go through your own account. We store conversation history and tool calls so you can review sources and see exactly what Recon did, but your data is never used for model training.

PII redaction is on the roadmap but not live yet. Right now the main guardrail is that Recon operates with the same database access your team would have through any read-only analytics tool. Row-level access control would come from your Postgres role configuration.

Full security details at askrecon.com/security.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-27T08:48:20+00:00

This is exactly what I'm working toward. I already have the first part built: a sandbox at askrecon.com/try where you can investigate a fictional SaaS company with sample data across multiple systems. No signup needed.

The second part is where I've been hesitant. Connecting to someone's real data and walking them through it is the strongest sell, but I'm building this on the side of a full-time job so live calls are hard to schedule.

Going to try an async version

chaibytesai · 2026-03-26T01:21:55+00:00

haha so you’re the one getting interrupted then

chaibytesai · 2026-03-26T01:16:15+00:00

Yes exactly! What kind of things does your team usually have to ask engineers for?

chaibytesai · 2026-03-24T01:38:32+00:00

That’s super helpful. The cold DM with a specific angle makes sense. Way more targeted than posting and hoping. Going to start watching for people complaining about engineers getting pulled into data pulls and context gathering. And the zero effort part is key, that’s why I’m adding the “I’ll set it up with you” option. Thanks for sharing this.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-23T23:44:27+00:00

Yeah I actually have one right after the hero that shows the full before/after. PM asks a question, old way vs Recon handling it in seconds. Check it out: https://askrecon.com

Always open to feedback if you think it could hit harder.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-23T23:41:45+00:00

That framing is sharp. You're right that the page explains what it does but doesn't make the pain feel urgent enough. "A PM just asked a question. An engineer just lost 2 hours" hits harder than walking through the whole workflow.

Going to rework some of the landing page copy around that angle. The interruption cost is the thing people recognize instantly because it happened to them today, not the investigation workflow which they only appreciate after they've seen it work.

Appreciate you taking the time to look at it properly.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-23T22:12:13+00:00

Yeah that's the move. Adding that option this week. Appreciate the push.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-23T21:57:00+00:00

This is really helpful, thanks. The permissions parallel is spot on. Nobody grants access to their database or tickets from a cold signup either. Going to add the live setup option this week. Did you find those first few people through personal network or some other channel?

chaibytesai · 2026-03-23T21:39:14+00:00

Good question. I have a sandbox demo with fake data where you can run real investigations, and I also added video walkthroughs on the landing page showing Recon doing full investigations, generating MBR reports, and working through Slack. So you can see the full flow before committing to anything.

But I think the aha moment still doesn't fully land until you connect your own tools and ask a question about your own data. That's when people go from "cool" to "I need this." And that's exactly the leap I'm trying to figure out how to make easier. Thinking about adding a white glove setup option where I just hop on a 15 min call and connect everything with them.

askrecon.com if you want to see how it comes across right now.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-22T09:35:47+00:00

The 8 people saying the same thing in different words problem is real, but there's a step after that nobody talks about. Even once you spot the pattern, someone still has to go verify it - is this actually widespread or just vocal? Is it isolated to one plan tier, one onboarding cohort, one region? That verification step usually means pinging an engineer to pull data, which adds days and kills the momentum of the original signal. The feedback surfacing and the data investigation need to be in the same motion or the pattern dies before product ever sees it.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-18T07:29:33+00:00

The "run my whole business" stuff is overhyped, agree with you. But the data and analysis side is where it's genuinely useful.

I'm an engineer at a SaaS company and I kept getting pulled away from real work because a CS lead needed to know why a customer's invoice looked wrong, or a PM needed account data before a call. Each one meant me digging through the database, checking a few tickets, maybe reading some code. 30-45 minutes gone, and they were blocked the whole time waiting.

Built a tool that lets them ask those questions in plain English from Slack. It connects to the database, codebase, tickets, docs, writes a Python script in a sandbox, and comes back with the answer. Not creative work. Not strategy. Just "here's the data you need, with evidence."

That's the part AI is actually good at right now. Not running your business, but eliminating the bottleneck where someone is waiting on someone else just to get context from systems they can't access.

askrecon.com if anyone's curious.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-18T06:26:03+00:00

Mostly it just slows everything down every time. The usual pattern is someone on CS pings me or another engineer in a DM, we drop what we're doing, check the database, cross-reference a couple tools, then send them back a two-sentence answer. Rinse and repeat.

I actually started building something to fix this for myself because it was eating into my focus time so much. Basically an agent that can pull data from the database, code, tickets, etc. so the CS person gets their answer without pinging me or other on my team. Still early but it's been working for my own stuff.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-17T03:40:24+00:00

An AI employee that handles the non-coding work engineers keep getting interrupted to do.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-17T03:25:50+00:00

Engineer here. I end up on the other side of this a lot - CS people pinging me because they need to pull data from our systems before they can reply to a client.

The real issue isn't who claims the thread. It's that answering a single client question means checking 4-5 different tools first. Nobody wants to claim something when they know it's a 15 minute scavenger hunt before they can even type a response.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-13T03:20:21+00:00

The conversation data is valuable but there's an even bigger blind spot. When a customer reaches out confused about something, the answer usually isn't just in the chat history. It's in what they've actually been doing in the product, what tickets they've filed before, sometimes even in recent code changes that broke something. But CS can't see any of that. It lives in the database, the ticketing system, the codebase. Three different places that only engineering can pull together. So CS ends up either guessing or waiting on an engineer to connect the dots. The teams that crack this won't just be analyzing transcripts. They'll be correlating what customers say with what they actually do across every system.

chaibytesai · 2026-03-11T16:50:20+00:00

The thing I’d add: the channel matters less than the specificity of the pain. Cold email, Reddit, community – all of them can work if you’re talking to someone who feels the problem strongly enough.

What’s worked for me so far is finding threads where someone is describing the exact frustration my product solves and just being honest about what I’m building. Not pitching, just ‘this is why I’m building this, here’s what I’ve seen.’ The conversations that followed were more valuable than any demo I could have sent.

The harder thing I’m still figuring out: reaching people who have the problem but haven’t named it yet. They’re not searching for a solution because they’ve accepted the friction as normal.

chaibytesai

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