The Chatend Master Plan

Over the past few months I have been working on the company known as Chatend. As you know, Chatend is a bespoke chatbot development platform as well as a chatbot consultancy. Here I will put forward my vision for the company and explain why I think Chatend is a platform worth building on.

Why chatbots?

I have been working in the field of web development for over 13 years now. Once I taught myself HTML, I started hosting with cPanel and PHP and slowly moved my way through node.js, React, and Next. Since then I've designed database access patterns and rolled out serverless APIs. I've built websites, web apps, and mobile apps. I've worked with a lot of different technologies and teams but there are a few consistent trends with software ideas:

Many ideas will never see the light of day because hiring a development team is expensive.
Every funded idea is behind schedule and over budget.
Every idea is built with a mixture of technologies that felt right at the time, but soon show their incompatibility with frequent use.
Every idea simultaneously has a frontend that is too complex, but not feature rich enough.
Every idea uses similar interface patterns (ex. passwords, navbars, Like buttons, etc.) to familiarize users with the app.
Every idea inevitably needs the same 4 backend patterns: Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD).
    Sometimes it feels like all we do as developers is build CRUD apps.

In November 2022, when I started building AI chatbots with GPT-3 for the first time I realized there was an opportunity to dramatically shift the way we build ideas. It started with the question:

When we achieve Artifical General Intelligence (AGI), the problem of software development will be solved instantly. AGI will simply develop all the software we ever need. But how does this actually look like? How do we communicate to the AGI what we want built? And what does the end product look like?

What does it actually build?

Chatend is the result of working backwards from that question.

Here's the bet: AGI won't start a new software project by reaching for Next.js or Qt or Electron. It won't start by building a web app, or a mobile app, or a desktop app. It will start with a chatbot. And it will start with a chatbot because chat interfaces are the most universally understood user interaction paradigm of all time. Everybody has texted before. Everybody knows how to use a chat app. And so, everybody knows how to use a chatbot. ChatGPT's wild success proves that people are ready to interact with chatbots on a daily basis. The problem with chatbots of the past was not that chatbots are a bad paradigm, but that the technology wasn't good enough. The conversational experience sucked. With Large Language Models, this is no longer the case.

So, for every software idea, Chatend starts with a chat interface. We certainly don't end there - we can add tables and fancy graphics and mobile apps later - but we start with chat. This solves a ridiculously long list of concerns up front, with some of the most important being:

Where do I host my idea?
What does the idea look like?
How do users access my idea?
Do I have to make people download and install something?
How do I make my idea accessible to users with disabilities?
How do I teach my users how to use my idea?
What's my frontend/backend stack?

We host your idea on Chatend. The idea looks like a chatbot. Users access your idea from any existing chat app they already have installed like Slack or Discord. Because it's accessed via a chat app, it's already cross platform and accessible from desktop, mobile, and tablets. Users already know how to interact with your idea: just text it as you would a person. Users immediately gain access to information and can start using your idea as soon as they learn about it. And your stack? Well, Chatend can do it all.

Read the rest of the post here: https://www.chatend.ai/blog/master-plan