Chatbase founder Yasser Elsaid discusses how sustained profitability enables his bootstrapped AI customer support company to operate like a funded startup.
Opinion
Yasser Elsaid: 95% of AI customer service limitations stem from harness architecture
“I would say like, 95% of the limitation is not from the model. It's from the harness. So like, it's my job to fix, but I think the intelligence is there and like, I think has been there for a while, especially for like, if you're only thinking about customer s…”
Insight
Proper AI harnesses enable 80% to 90% customer issue resolution rates
“If the harness is good enough, I would say, of course, it depends on the industry, but on average, you can get to 80, 90% of resolutions for, like, customer product issues, but to get there, it's the job of the harness”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Open-source AI demand spiked on hype before reverting to frontier labs
“Like all the open source models, I think what happened was they got like very hyped and people were very interested in using them. But I think like over time, like there was a spike in usage for these models. And then it goes back to open AI, Anthropic and Goo…”
Insight
AI model switching costs remain non-zero due to fragile harness optimizations
“People keep saying like the cost of switching between models is zero. It's cheap, but it's not zero because sometimes you like spend, you know, three, four months, like fine tuning exactly how the model should be, or like how the, Product should be. And then o…”
Opinion
Employee-generated content is replacing ineffective influencer marketing strategies
“I think EGC is very underrated. I think that's the new influencer marketing. Influencer marketing, I feel like, doesn't work anymore. So I think that's, yeah, that's the new thing.”
Insight
Pure self-serve PLG fails for enterprise adoption without human outbound assistance
“I think a big mistake that PLG companies do is that, like, we're a PLG company, like, here's the pricing page, just, like, do your thing and pay us every month. But I think, one, like, even if your product is extremely intuitive and, like, everyone is able to …”