In December 2023, I was happily spending all of my time working on Campfire. At the same time, I was watching ChatGPT take over the world, and thinking about how these tools might change the way we work, and more specifically, the ways we use software.
I came to the conclusion that in the future there would be little point in a person learning how to use the UI of many types of software. Instead you'd just show up, tell an AI assistant on the webpage what you're trying to accomplish, and it would go and do that for you. If that theory was correct, then I figured nearly every software product on Earth would soon be on the market for a tool that could place that assistant on their site.
So why couldn't I build that tool myself?
I enlisted the help of my friend and coworker at Campfire, Ernesto, to build this out and launch it. We built an MVP that allowed companies to add a bot to their site that could do all the same front-end tasks that users could do. In my opinion it was actually a pretty cool demo and did some interesting things under the hood (like translating the user's requests into JavaScript that would then run in a sandbox and store the resulting function calls, which we would then call on the user's behalf).
Unfortunately, neither I nor Ernesto had the patience or time to do B2B sales, and neither of us was fully committed. And in a business like this, full of massive competition at the bleeding edge of the hottest new technology, you can't win if you're not fully invested (and doing sales).
So after a ProductHunt launch and some experimentation with cold emails, Rehance fizzled out without a dollar in real revenue to show for it.
I also learned the hard lesson that it's best not to start a C Corporation for a business that you're not fully committed to and has no customers. Because Rehance turned out to be a pretty expensive failure.