Nick Francis

speaker

323 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Nick Francis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Startups For the Rest of Us · Episode 839 | The Journey Growing Help Scout to $35M ARR · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

And for that reason, there's a lot of people that have tried to build tools that make it so that you don't have to have as many humans involved because humans are the biggest expense in that cost center.

And so look, back in 2017, there were AI chatbots, right?

But they were built on these machine learning models where we actually did the math.

We investigated these tools, we tried to build some of these chatbots, and we realized they were really poor customer experience.

And ultimately, less than 5% of our customers had enough data for a machine learning model to even be useful to them.

And so it wasn't the right time for us.

So when LLMs came along, I was psyched.

I mean, Rob, you and I are builders, right?

Like we love to build software.

And for that reason, I was psyched about these new tools because I've never had so much fun building in my life.

I had no idea what was to come.

But basically, when we first learned about ChatGPT, which I think was in late 2022, we did a hackathon.

much like a lot of other companies, just to explore these tools and see what was possible.

And so right away, we built a tool to summarize conversations.

We built a tool to draft responses.

And then we ended up making an acquisition along those lines.

But we built like six things over the course of two weeks.

We had a little working group and I was in the details working on these products myself as well.

And we had a lot of fun building with those tools.

And I think that that was sort of the beginning of...

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