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.
A client starts as a lead, becomes a deal, gets negotiated, and eventually turns into a signed agreement. But somewhere in the middle, we switch from the CRM to a completely different system.
That feels weird to me.
It s still the same client, the same deal, and the same relationship so why split the workflow?
Maybe there s a good reason for keeping them separate that I m missing. What do you think?
I want to have a serious conversation about something that has been sitting on me for a while.
Why do genuinely valuable products stay in the shadows while generic copycat solutions collect hundreds of upvotes?
Let me be fair about this first. I have no idea how much of that attention turns into actual users, revenue, or retention. I don't know their numbers. Maybe the hype is working fine. Maybe it isn't. I can't see inside any of it. So I'm not going to claim those products are bad. I'm going to claim something narrower and stranger: that the systems rewarding them are not measuring what we think they are measuring.
Correcting the headline number on my own post. I wrote sixteen months here and that was wrong, our blog has been running since June. I used a figure I had not checked, so I am fixing it rather than leaving it up.
Founder here, I run a done-for-you affiliate storefront service, so I am not neutral about this. I sell storefronts that depend on traffic, and the traffic on my own marketing blog is in single digits, which is why I went looking.
When I started building my current project, I expected most of my time to go into the actual product.
Instead, I ve spent a surprising amount of time on all the surrounding pieces: authentication, email flows, payments, database design, deployment, error handling, SEO, and all the little things that only become obvious once you start putting everything together.
None of it is particularly exciting on its own, but it adds up quickly.
For people who have built and launched SaaS products before: what was the part you underestimated the most before starting?
When I focused on just one platform, building momentum felt natural. The routine was manageable: write deeply, engage genuinely in the comments, and refine the message based on real-time feedback. Quality was high because my energy wasn't divided.
The trouble started when I decided to be "everywhere at once." Suddenly, a single piece of content had to be reformatted for five different algorithms, repurposed into short video clips, formatted for newsletters, and scheduled across multiple time zones. Instead of spending time crafting insightful ideas, most of my day went into administrative distribution. The content lost its depth, and burnout followed quickly.
How do you expand your reach to new channels without diluting the quality of your core message?
