u/altraschoy

Curious what the founder crowd here is seeing.

We've been running a few AI-native bets in parallel out of our software agency and the pattern across them is starting to feel like:

What looked good in 2024 but isn't holding up:

• "AI agent for X" pitches without a clear human-in-the-loop layer. Customers turn them on, get burned by one bad output, never come back.
• "AI-native" SaaS where the AI itself is the headline differentiator. We keep watching those bets lose to incumbents who slapped GPT into their existing surface — distribution beats novelty.
• Workshops and one-off training. People feel smarter for a week, then revert. We had to kill our own AI engineering workshop product and rebuild it as ongoing coaching for that reason.

What's working better than expected:

• Living in surfaces the user already inhabits (WhatsApp, Slack, email) instead of asking them to learn a new dashboard. Cuts the activation
• problem in half.
• Multiple cheap experiments in parallel instead of one big product bet. We just shipped a new AI ops agent for staffing agencies with three lead magnets simultaneously.
  • a WhatsApp bot for the operator who wants to feel it,
  • a 60-second side-by-side LLM-vs-agentic-workflow demo for the skeptic,
  • a 10-day course for the cautious.
    • Letting engagement signal which segment is the real wedge.
• Cooperative-style ownership. With 20+ co-owners we can run more parallel bets than a single founder could. This way the failure of any one bet doesn't sink the team but we're still around zero with AI-native offerings.

What we're still trying to figure out:

• Whether "AI-native" companies actually have durable moats or whether everyone re-converges to the same product surface in 18 months.
• Whether you can monetize agents that primarily save time rather than directly create revenue. Most of our agents fall in the first bucket and pricing it is harder than we thought.

Asking the sub:

• If you're running an AI-native agency: which of the above bets are matching your data, and which are wrong?
• What's the unsexy thing that ended up mattering more than the AI itself?
• Anyone solved the "agent matters more in hour 3 than hour 0" demo problem?

context: we're a tech cooperative. We've been running internal AI workflows for our own recruitment for months, and over the last six weeks we did three long customer interviews with operators in EU staffing to figure out what was actually painful versus what the AI vendor pitch decks say is painful.

Three findings genuinely surprised us:

1. Sourcing isn't the bottleneck in most EU markets; convincing candidates to engage is. One veteran put it as "95% convincing, 5% matching". In low-unemployment markets, candidates rarely self-apply. Every placement is a real, somewhat-charming human conversation. Any tool that automates "find me ten Java developers" is solving the wrong half of the problem.
2. CV reformatting is eating a real hour per submission at most agencies because client screeners keep moving the format goalposts. A senior eng with 15 years experience got a 42% match score on a client's screening tool not because they weren't qualified, but because the CV wasn't in the right shape. A recruiter can spend an hour reformatting by hand. Every week.
3. The reason in-ATS AI keeps disappointing isn't model quality — it's context starvation. Your judgment as a recruiter lives across LinkedIn, email, Slack DMs, and 1:1 notes from last week. The platform AI sees ~10% of that and is being asked to make the same calls you make. (Credit to the recruiters on this sub who've said versions of this in passing — it crystallised for us listening to you.) That's why every operator we talked to said the same thing: "I just use ChatGPT in another tab and ignore the platform AI.

What we shipped:

Chief lives on WhatsApp. No install, no login. You text it like a colleague "find me three relevant backend roles for Daniel, he's on the bench", and it scans your website + open job boards, surfaces matches, and drafts outreach. Persistent memory, so you don't re-introduce yourself or your roster every conversation.

Try it 👉 https://chiefbase.camplight.net/resources/chief-on-whatsapp/

It's free. Soft launch, no paywall yet. The reason we're posting here and not running paid ads is that we want operator feedback from people who actually feel the pain, so we can co-create a working solution.

Tell us what's broken. Tell us where it's annoying. Tell us if the angle's wrong entirely.

Happy to answer anything in comments. Especially curious whether the WhatsApp surface feels right or weird for your day-to-day.