The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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”
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…”
Bootstrapped company equity is more tangible than high-valuation VC options
“I actually think it's more real than when you're raised, like, at a high valuation that the company needs to, one, live up to, but then surpass for your options to, like, start to be worth something.”
Chatbase is actively replacing Zendesk as customers migrate to AI-native solutions
“Yeah, I think then, yeah, we are replacing Zendesk. So a lot of people are moving off of Zendesk to using it.”
Defining what qualifies as a resolution is the flaw in outcome-based pricing
“I think the only bigger, big problem with the outcome based is the definition of the outcome. Like you can call anything a resolution.”
Chatbase skipped VC fundraising because rapid traction left no time to pitch
“I thought I was going to do that, but because the product went so, like, it got so much traction so quickly, the reason I didn't do this is I didn't have the time.”
No commercial products augmented GPT models with custom data pre-ChatGPT
“Like I saw some people doing demos, but like in like a CLI or something like that, but there was no product doing like this model, but with additional data on top of it.”
Chatbase scaled from zero to $1 million ARR in 117 days
“I think doing that helped a lot into, Getting me from like zero, basically to one million AR in a 117 days.”
Offering custom demos to free signups functions as highly converting warm outbound
“You do content, you have the PLG motion, and then you put people in an email flow and in a calling flow where if they sign up, even if they don't subscribe or if they Like one of your posts, you reach out to them and say, hey, like, we want to build you a demo…”
Building viable AI startups still requires traditional sales and user calls
“I think a lot of people were saying, oh, like, AI is going to change how you build a business, but I think what helped me actually, like, make this a business is I did all the, you know, like, the normal business stuff, you know, like, talking to users, gettin…”
Most Chatbase enterprise customers still prefer usage-based pricing over outcome-based pricing
“We started to like give some bigger customers the option to do that. And I think most of them still choose like the usage based, but some do choose the outcome based.”
Chatbase customer model usage is split 50% OpenAI, 50% Anthropic and Google
“Maybe 50% is still on Okunai. Yeah. Yeah. And then 50 on everything else. Yeah. But everything else is like mainly Anthropic and Google.”
The United Nations uses Chatbase on Facebook Messenger for regional crisis support
“Like, the UN is using us right now on their Facebook messenger. So when people reach out to them, specifically for, like, specific regions, it gets drafted to Chatbase, and Chatbase helps them.”
Chatbase's sustained profitability enables aggressive VC-style hiring and scaling
“We're now at a point that we can function as a VCVAC company because we've been profitable for so long that it's as if we raised already, and, like, we can, now I have the mindset of being as aggressive with things like hiring and scaling,”
Single LinkedIn posts from large AI pages drove $3,000 MRR spikes
“Basically like I would have like this maybe big AI page post about chat base, and I would see Stripe like maybe a few hours later go up by like 3000 MRR from just that one post.”
Chatbase currently serves 10,000 active enterprise and mid-market customers
“We have 10,000 active customers.”