At the beginning of this year I was fractional CTO at a small b2b startup and was surprised by how what I considered to be the basic requirements of a customer support platform was split across multiple tools and all priced per-user. This essentially forced a small team to limit who in the org had visibility into what was being communicated to customers.
I set out to solve that with https://stayupfront.com and now that the build is in a good place i’m finally having to bite the bullet and learn marketing. I’m also realising that all the advice to start with marketing first was probably good advice!
If you're on one of the betas for about-to-be-released apple OS’s, there's a new describe an extension functionality and building a dark mode for HN is exactly what I just used it to do. Super easy, and synced across all my devices.
I know this sounds like an ad, but I was pretty impressed with it
I get the temptation to self-host your support platform, as the existing tooling out there can be quite expensive when you want to upgrade from just using an email inbox.
If any founders find themselves reading this, and don't think it's the best idea to self-host your own support infra, I've just spent the last 6+ months building stayupfront.com which has, I think, quite reasonable pricing, and a few more features than this... largely around the customer's portal experience (changelog, roadmap, etc.) and includes monitoring & incident management which I think should all be ran from the same surface.
I've only just soft-launched, so still have founding pricing on there. Would certainly love to speak to others in this space too, as I was surprised how neglected an area it seemed to be when I was trying to find a replacement for jira service desk for a company I was working with at the beginning of this year.
I dont think the helpdesk / webmail space is saturated, I was looking into this and most of them don’t have the features I need such as automatic LLM assistance, automated translation, sharing tickets among multiple accounts etc.
The only listed feature here I've not got is the automated translation. It will currently draft responses in the incoming language right now – though that's not terribly useful if you don't speak that language.
I'd been considering mostly an English speaking audience at launch. To be more accurate, I was generally thinking about users physically local to me initially, so I could meet with them for customer onboarding and feedback etc.
Your post has got me thinking on an approach to making translation work in an open and honest way, so that is something I will experiment with and hopefully get in quite quickly.
If you'd be interested in helping me test that, please feel free to reach out to hello@stayupfront.com
Same here. Over the last two weeks I switched back to Opus 4.8 and turns out that still seems to last the week like it used to. These new models must be eating tokens.
On the other hand, all the little services I'm building for myself are passwordless and use passkeys with emailed codes for setup/reset.
Passwords were a really poor solution to the problem of security, they didn't take the human factor into account. After a rocky start, I'm now finding passkeys super easy and convenient to use. Far more convenient than OTP codes.
I appreciate that if you're OS/browser doesn't integrate nicely with passwords you might be in for a bad time. I'm having a great time with 1Password, though I believe native apple handles them nicely now too – and I suspect this is true of any modern password manager (even the ones built into the browser).
This is great – I built almost the same thing. It's eerie how similar it made that footer on the public websites! Your app definitely looks a bit nicer than mine though! https://belfry.robgough.net
I actually started with a Mac app primarily, as I wanted to have an easier way to switch sessions with the mouse and see Claude Code's status at a glance (I had herdr envy, but wanted to keep tmux). I then figured why not do the iOS/iPad version while I was at it.
Highly encourage you to build out a Desktop version, I'm now using mine as my only terminal and wouldn't go back. Working across machines feels seamless.
I built my own because I was frustrated with a lot of the free options. Largely because a lot of them had an upsell to be able to do the secondary post-processing step with an LLM. And it wouldn't pick up things like emojis properly or say numbers. Because of that, I left quite a lot of options in there for customising and adding additional steps, etc. Feel free to take a look: dictator.robgough.net
My initial Mac version actually had three additional steps that you could toggle, obviously at the cost of some speed. That is what the website talks about, although nowadays for my own use I've reduced that to just one step and found that it's pretty great. I've got a new version in test to tidy that up, but still lets you define as many steps as you want.
I think that's parakeet doing its job there. That is a closer reflection of what you've actually said. The trick is then throwing that output through some additional deterministic and non-deterministic steps to tidy it up however you prefer. It's exactly what I do with my free and open source dictation app (dictator.robgough.net) for Mac+iOS. And of course, everything stays entirely on-device. Gemma E4B is really wonderful for that second step, it's great at language – but takes up 6-7GB RAM.
Site could identify our device and send iOS visitors to the iOS page (or maybe that’s against the vibe and we should tap it ourselves).
App might be able to launch the keyboard settings directly but I suppose Apple doesn’t like devs using those undocumented URIs (uhg but maybe can understand part of it).
Keyboard, given manual app switchbacking + manual pasting, is less convenient for some of my use cases compared to an action button shortcut. (Reference Spokenly w/Local-Only Mode.)
Separating dictation and the history, and having a syncable scratch pad, are some welcome innovations!
>Gemma E4B … takes up 6-7GB RAM.
Google has a spyware-adjacent dictation app (maybe not really, but they demand to connect to servers after you enable their offline toggle). Just like yours, they thought of a cute name too (Google AI Edge Eloquent). Do you know what language model they install on the iPhone? Not a very good one but I’m sure over the next year or two…
I really wanted to have background audio and make it so the keyboard would directly record audio etc, but my first pass didn't make it through app review (and that was just keeping background audio listening AFTER you'd already started a recording). I could maybe have fought it, but figured if I was already butting up against app review there was little point as they'd likely reject in a future release anyway.
Re: analytics, It is quite weird having no idea how many people are using the app. It does leave you a little blind, but I figure people will get in touch if they have big enough problems with it.
For the Google app, I believe Gemma E2B and E4B both have audio input, so I suspect they're using one of those.
Analytics: if you generate them on my device, and bury an option to manually send them to you when I have a bug--or...
you instead bury an opt-in to automatic telemetry, and let us CC ourselves each ~month when the analytics get sent in to you (so we can verify it's all boring data)...
It's hard for me not to opt in to stuff like that, at least periodically. If I'm opted-in by default? Ehhhhh.... I totally get it, weird "flying blind" (quoting a different dev w/similar philosophy), but I guess I'm still weird myself and hence looking for that autonomy or something? Oh and if somebody makes something opt in, and then certainly if they furthermore stick the option somewhere slightly off the beaten path, that seems pretty darn trustworthy.
(I wonder if we'd have enough public data for a decent statistician to calculate a likely number range of how many users you have by extrapolating from the 1% to 10% or 20% of users who'd chose to opt in...)
PS: "bury" concept likely not actually important :)
I set out to solve that with https://stayupfront.com and now that the build is in a good place i’m finally having to bite the bullet and learn marketing. I’m also realising that all the advice to start with marketing first was probably good advice!
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