Chatbase's AI CCO: Beyond Support, Into Sales & Strategy
Yasser Elsaid shares Chatbase's vision for AI agents as 'Chief Customer Officers' – proactively driving sales, onboarding, and surfacing product insights.
⚡️ Competing with ChatGPT and Sierra, building a $10M ARR company — Yasser Elsaid, Founder, Chatbase
With swyx, Alessio Fanelli, Yasser Elsaid · Sunday, May 3, 2026
Yasser Elsaid, founder of Chatbase, discusses his journey from a bootstrapped side project to a $10M ARR AI customer service company. He shares insights into Chatbase's product-led growth strategy, its vision for AI agents as "Chief Customer Officers," and practical advice for founders, including a detailed go-to-market manifesto for B2B AI startups.
Key takeaways
- Yasser Elsaid, founder of Chatbase, is building more than just AI customer support. His vision is for AI agents to become true "Chief Customer Officers" (CCOs) for entire companies. Read more →
- Yasser Elsaid, founder of Chatbase, states that for AI customer service agents, 95% of limitations come from the "harness" (the surrounding system), not the underlying LLM. Read more →
- Chatbase founder Yasser Elsaid now uses AI chatbots like Claude as his primary discovery engine to research and choose new business tools, bypassing traditional search entirely. Read more →
- Yasser Elsaid, founder of Chatbase, argues that successful AI companies must hire for extreme adaptability, valuing open-minded problem-solvers over traditional "craft coders." Read more →
- Yasser Elsaid, founder of the $10M ARR AI customer service company Chatbase, runs his entire GTM from a Notion document he calls his "go to market manifesto." He credits its principles for Chatbase's recent surge. Read more →
- Yasser Elsaid rapidly built Chatbase from a side project into a company hitting $1 million ARR in just 117 days after ChatGPT's public release. Read more →
6 articles from this episode
AI Agents: Your Harness, Not LLM, Limits 95% of Performance
Yasser Elsaid reveals 95% of AI agent limitations come from the 'harness,' not the LLM. Learn why switching LLMs costs months of tuning.
AI Engine Optimization: How Founders are Hacking Discovery
Chatbase founder Yasser Elsaid reveals how AI chatbots are becoming the new search engines for tools, and shares early tactics to influence their recommendations.
Bootstrapped Equity Trumps VC Hype for Top AI Talent
Chatbase founder Yasser Elsaid reveals how bootstrapped equity beats high valuations for attracting AI talent and the adaptable hires that thrive when models drop daily.
Chatbase Founder Yasser Elsaid's GTM Manifesto for B2B AI
Yasser Elsaid, Chatbase founder, shares his GTM manifesto for B2B AI startups: master B2B basics, consistent content, and make every employee a content creator.
Chatbase's Yasser Elsaid: $1M ARR in 117 Days Needed Sales Calls
Yasser Elsaid shares how Chatbase hit $1M ARR in 117 days & $10M bootstrapped. Discover why even viral AI products require direct B2B sales calls for true scale.
More Latent Space episodes
- Inside the Team That Killed Mandatory Code Review — Quinn Slack, AMPSep 13 · 6 articles
- The Inference Frontier: from 100 to 10,000 tokens per second — Sean Lie, Cerebras CTOSep 6 · 6 articles
- Trillion Token Context. No, Really — Anima Anandkumar & Benedikt Jenik, Accelerated UnderstandingSep 6 · 5 articles
- 🔬 Why Transformers Hit a Wall the Moment Physics Shows Up — Anima Anandkumar, CaltechAug 30 · 5 articles