We were hiking as usual in the hills around our Marin county neighborhood. We, two tech enthusiasts and neighbors, found ourselves deep in conversation about AI. We have our lot of experiences making products in the tech industry. And we just had to fix something that felt wrong.
Like millions of people, ChatGPT had captivated our attention. Finally a chatbot that made chatting fun! But also a coding assistant that we can use to build things ourselves.
In a previous venture called Bouquet.ai, we worked on a chatbot to answer questions about complex enterprise data – things like “who was our biggest customer in net revenue for product P last quarter in Europe?” Imagine that in Slack instead of pulling up a report. It was cool, the analytics worked great but the chat part was unreliable and very constrained.
How much things had changed since then! We now had the technology to actually understand users and chat with them in “real life” – not in the specific format required to identify intents and keywords.
The more we mulled over these thoughts, the clearer the idea became: this is bigger than searching a database. Search on websites sucks, and yet there’s a search bar on every website! We should change that. And thus, the idea of Rozz was born.
Now to the execution. One of us was a product manager, not a developer. There was a unique opportunity to learn coding by doing, to get our hands dirty, to make and not prescribe. So, we rolled up our sleeves and began our journey, relying on the AI that had inspired us: ChatGPT.
Like many early users, we were amazed both by our early product experience and the joy of building it. We learned to chat with the AI and it became our coding coach. Unfamiliar with many of the technologies we needed to incorporate, we leaned heavily on ChatGPT. It guided us through the technology trade-offs, explained unfamiliar concepts, helped us write code, and interpret server logs and error messages. When a breakthrough occurred, it celebrated with us, delivering encouraging notes – these seem obvious now, especially with the sycophancy problems in AI, but for us it was astonishing.
Today, after many iterations, countless hours of work, and a profusion of lessons learned, after months of trial, we’re delighted launch Rozz. This powerful tool, conceptualized and developed right here in Marin County, is open for business!
Sure, there are lots of competitors out there – and Rozz won’t be the best choice for all. But if you have tons of content and very little time, then give Rozz a spin. A lot of AI is baked into it to automate work that otherwise you, or your users, would have to do. Unless, of course, you prefer to leave it all to OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and have nobody but robot crawlers on your site.
As we look back at the journey that brought us here, we realize how much AI is embedded into our daily life. There’s a lot of talk about doomerism and AI taking over the world. So far, we’ve seen an aspect of AI where it is immensely helpful, patient and eager to help.
We hope you try Rozz out and make your website better. Please give us feedback to help us improve.
Adrien Schmidt, co-founder of Rozz