Daria Bilokon

If you plan to grow your startup into a big business, the path can look something like:

You build - launches - get users - join an accelerator - raise money - find investors - hire people - build a team - grow the company...

And at some point, I wonder:

Are you still the maker who builds the product?

I tested 10 prompts like "best tool for X" in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Our product came up in 2 of 30 answers, and a competitor with less traffic showed up in 14.

Curious how others approach this:

• Do you track AI mentions at all, or is it too early to matter?

• Has anything you changed (docs, reviews, comparison pages) actually moved the needle?

• Is "AI search visibility" a real channel yet, or mostly hype?

The more AI customer support projects I work on, the more I feel support is only the starting point. Most teams begin with fairly obvious use cases: answering FAQs, handling tickets, updating orders, or triggering refunds.

That makes sense. These problems are easy to define and the value is easy to measure.

But once the AI is connected to customer data, CRM, billing, product usage, and other systems, its role can become much broader.