Chat.com Domain Purchase

Dharmesh Shah shares the story of why he purchased chat.com and how it connects to his 17-year journey in conversational interfaces.

"17 years ago, before HubSpot, I had this idea. Everyone was using email and Outlook back then, before the iPhone. I thought business software was really hard to talk to, and I wanted to make it like emailing an assistant. I called the product InGentaMail.

Five years ago, I realized email was the wrong conduit - it needed to be web-based. I built a product called GrowthBot, talked about it on the Inbound stage, got thousands of users. It was awesome except for one thing - it didn't work. It couldn't do the natural language understanding I wanted it to do, despite using products from Google, Facebook, and open search projects.

Then when GPT-3 comes along, I'm like, 'Oh, that thing I've been thinking about for 17 years is now possible.' So I started working on ChatSpot.ai. Then chat.com comes along - it had been dormant for 30 years.

The true reason I bought it? I'm trying to get into the AI party, and I'm nobody in that particular party. ChatSpot moves me in that direction, and chat.com - even if I break even or lose a few million - is worth the price of admission. It pays the cover charge, showing 'this guy gets it' about chat UX, which Bill Gates just talked about last week as the next big thing."