chatbase is making $8M a year (and leaving $22M on the table)

If you read the LinkedIn post, you already know I think Chatbase has a positioning problem. Let me show you exactly why it's costing them - and what any founder stuck at this crossroads can actually do about it.

The first thing that jumped out wasn't the pricing - it was the logos.

Chuck E. Cheese sitting next to National Grid sitting next to IHG on the same homepage.

That's not a diverse customer base. That's a company that hasn't decided who it's for yet.

When you try to signal credibility to enterprise buyers while your pricing starts at $40/month AND your product name still sounds like a 2022 hackathon project - you don't get both audiences. You get neither.

Enterprise buyers smell it immediately. Indie founders feel like they've already been replaced. And the team writing the copy? They're just as lost.

The second problem is subtler but worse: the language moved before the product did.

"Platform for building AI agents for customer service" is enterprise language. It promises scale, security, integration, dedicated support. But the actual buying experience: self-serve, no-code, $40/month - is still indie-founder energy.

Buyers don't bounce because the product is bad but because something feels off and they can't name it. That's a positioning gap doing exactly what positioning gaps do.

I've sat in this exact room.

At Bitpanda, we were pitching Raiffeisen Bank for a white-label partnership while our product still looked and felt like it was built for crypto-curious millennials. They passed.

Not because the product wasn't ready. Because we didn't look like a company they could put their name next to.

A year later, after we changed how we showed up - the messaging, the look, the language - they signed.

What actually changed? We stopped looking like a crypto product and started looking like a fintech. We stopped talking only to people who already believed in crypto and started showing that normal people trusted us too. The moment we did that - we became a company a bank could picture their name next to.

We weren't losing on product. We looked and felt different than we thought we did.

These 4 things. In this exact order.

Pick one buyer and let the other one go - at least on the homepage. You can still serve both in reality, but the front door has to be for someone specific. Chatbase should pick: developers building custom agents OR enterprise teams replacing support infrastructure. Not both. Not yet.

Go line by line through everything buyer-facing. Pricing, logos, copy, product screenshots, support model - they all have to tell the same story. Ask yourself: does this belong to the company we're becoming or the company we used to be? One thing out of sync breaks everything.

Take the name seriously. "Chatbase" can stretch if everything around it signals the right thing. Or it can't - and better to know that now. This isn't about vanity, it's about whether the name is helping or slowing you down.

Say out loud where you're going. "Built for teams that have outgrown no-code chatbots" is a sentence that does real work. It pulls in the right people and politely tells the wrong ones this isn't for them anymore.

If you're reading this and thinking about your own homepage - that's not a coincidence.

This is what $5-15M looks like when the positioning hasn't caught up with the business yet. You're not stuck because the product isn't good enough. You're stuck because the signal is.

If this sounds familiar, you know where to find me.

See you next week,

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