I put a founder-answered chat button on every logged-in page. Small ship, might be my highest-leverage move this month.

Quick build-in-public update from BuildBase (buildbase.app - a Node/React SDK that bundles auth, billing, workspaces, notifications, etc. into one npm install).

Where we are: ~100+ signups, still working on landing our first external paying customers. Five of our own products are running on it in production, so the dogfood proof is real, but the paid-conversion story is a work in progress.

The thing I've been quietly obsessing over is activation. Not traffic. Not SEO. Not new features. Just: people sign up, land in the console, and some non-trivial number of them bounce before they hit the moment where BuildBase actually saves them time. That drop-off is the whole ballgame right now.

So today I shipped what looks like a boring update:

Fixed a handful of dashboard bugs on the console that were quietly making the first-run experience feel scrappier than it is.
Added a Crisp chat button on every logged-in page. Not just on marketing pages. Every screen inside console.buildbase.app.

The second one is the actual bet. Here's the reasoning:

At pre-revenue stage, my worst enemy isn't a competitor. It's silent bounce. Someone signs up, gets confused on step 3 of setup, and closes the tab. I never know what step 3 was. I never get to fix it. They never come back.

Chat on every logged-in page collapses that. When someone gets stuck, they can yell at me in one click. I'm the one replying. Not a bot. Not tier-1 outsourced support. Just me, usually within an hour or two.

Two things I get from this:

The user gets unblocked and might actually finish setup instead of bouncing.
I get a live stream of exactly where people trip. That's product research I'd otherwise pay a lot for.

The honest tradeoff: this doesn't scale. If we hit 10,000 users I can't personally answer every chat. But at 100 signups, the "doesn't scale" version is the correct version. Paul Graham was right about that one.

The other honest thing: I could have shipped this on day one. I didn't, because "founders should focus on writing code" is a comfortable story and answering chat feels like a distraction from the roadmap. It isn't. It IS the roadmap, at this stage.

Curious how others handled support at the pre-revenue-to-first-customers stage. Did you gate chat behind a paid tier, or leave it wide open? Anyone regret going too high-touch too early? Would love war stories.