Building AI agents for clients accidentally turned me into a SaaS owner
I've run a small consultancy for the past couple of years building AI agents for larger companies, 50-100 employees, 20m+ turnover. Chat and voice, inbound and outbound. Mostly on Voiceflow, Vapi and Retell, because the level of control you get over workflows is hard to beat: you can make an agent way more specific to a business and wire in deeper API integrations, which is what companies at that size actually need. More effective, reliable and cheaper to run than throwing a raw LLM and a knowledge base at everything.
That part was going fine. The problem was how the client themselves interacted with the agent.
Every client wanted the same things once the agent was live: a way to see conversations, jump in and take over when the AI got stuck, route to the right department, monitor their voice calls, some analytics. And I wanted to hand them all of that under my own brand.
The problem was that when I went looking for a layer like this, the only one that actually looked good enough was Intercom, but Intercom would have locked me into a single type of agent (their own, Fin), I couldn't brand it as mine, and I'd have no ownership over hosting. That's not a business, that's an implementer: less money, no leverage, and closer to an internal employee than a partner. I was building a company, so I needed something that could do all of it and still be mine.
There were only two whitelabel options that even came close.
The first, Chatdash, was genuinely nice to look at but had no handover capability. With a client running 40 support staff who needed to take over chats day and night, that ruled it out immediately.
The second, Convocore, could actually do handover and let me put my branding on it, so by default that's who I went with. But the UI wasn't what I wanted, there was no departmental handover, and over the following months it would frequently go down and support were hard to get hold of at the best of times.
When I asked about features like departmental handover or other enhancements, they wouldn't really bite. They'd decided to go into the AI agent market themselves and fancy their chances against companies like Voiceflow... which, fair play, more power to them, but it meant they cared a lot less about the layer I actually depended on. Updates got pushed left, right and centre, and half the time they broke access or functionality for my clients.
So I kept rebuilding the same sub-par layer for every client. At some point it stopped being a layer for my clients and started being a product I was accidentally maintaining.
I knew if I wanted to deliver what was actually in my head which was a dashboard that looked like Intercom, worked at scale, and allowed multiple types of high level agent providers etc.. I had to build it myself.
I'm not going to pretend I knew how. I started with the grand version in Lovable, which got me a nice-looking shell but nothing that would survive a real client. So I moved over to Claude Code and actually set it up properly with the right integrations, a real backend, real infrastructure...and after 8 months of sweaty sessions on claude code... it actually works. Genuinely works, at scale... which is unreal and i know that only a few years ago a company would have spent 100x more money building something like this.
So now there's one dashboard that I BUILT MYSELF and sits on top of the best agents: live view of every conversation, take over text chats mid-conversation, monitor voice calls, department routing, white labelling incase other companies wanted to use it and full analytics etc. WhatsApp integration built in. The agency keeps its own brand on the front... the agency's end client never sees the platform, or me.
We even got Meta approval, which was its own saga. And having now seen everything else out there properly, I can say fairly confidently that what I've built is better than the alternatives.
Which means the only thing left is getting it in front of people, and now ive suddenly got one more business i need to grow 😂
No ask here, thats the story. It's free while I'm testing it with real agencies, if youre one I'll even help you get your first client set up on it. Not trying to sell anything yet, I mostly just want feedback from other people who do this for a living. DM me etc.