Market competition is a powerful driver of innovation. It encourages both individuals and businesses to constantly improve the quality of their products and allows them to succeed solely on the merits of their services.

This meritocratic principle drives software engineer Haseab. After starting out in the nonprofit sector, he moved into the competitive space of tech entrepreneurship. Today, he is the founder of automatic.chat, an AI platform that helps businesses build and monitor robust AI assistants simply and cost-effectively.

Read on to learn more about Haseab’s journey and how following a meritocratic approach has shaped his commitment to developing accessible AI solutions.

Getting Started in Nonprofits

Haseab began his management career on the board of directors of Neill Wycik, a non-profit housing co-op in downtown Toronto. He brought a fresh perspective to a senior-level board, and while he was initially enthusiastic about his work, Haseab noticed the board lacked a proactive mindset. This motivated him to come up with a strategic plan to achieve goals such as creating a proactive member recruitment program, establishing strong management reporting, and revitalizing member engagement. Just two years into his term, he was elected chairman of the board.

However, Haseab quickly became frustrated with the politics displayed by some of his fellow board members. He felt that many of them were personally motivated to carry out their selfish agendas rather than uniting behind the best interests of the organization. “When you have 12 unpaid volunteers running a multimillion-dollar organization, aligning incentives is a daunting task,” notes Haseab.

Disappointed with this bureaucracy, Haseab left Neill Wycik, believing his efforts would be better suited to an environment less driven by internal politics. Instead, he united incentives through innovation and value creation – something he says the nonprofit sector often lacks.
Motivated by this shift in perspective and fully embracing a meritocratic approach to business, Haseab brought his talents to the emerging field of artificial intelligence.

Enter the world of technology

Looking to get involved in something new, Haseab teamed up with a high school friend to launch his first startup, micropay.ai. This web application allows users to access text-to-image generators like Dall-E on a pay-as-you-go basis. So instead of paying $15 up front for 100 image generation credits, you could just pay 10 cents for an image. To avoid multiple credit card fees on such tiny transactions, micropay.ai used the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol that allowed near-instant, sensation-free transactions.

This project initially gained traction, garnering 1,000 orders in the first week of launch and gaining attention from the Lightning Network community. But after a few months of development, Haseab and his co-founder realized that a “one-off” pay-as-you-go structure was more of a burden to users than a benefit: it forced them to make a financial decision every time. purchase. ultimately causing decision fatigue and driving them away.

Compare this to a simpler pay-as-you-go platform like Amazon Web Services, which tracks usage in a ledger and charges you once at the end of the month. Additionally, the Lightning Network’s user base proved too small, prohibiting any meaningful scale.

Haseab looks back nostalgically on that first experience and acknowledges his mistakes: “We spent so much time and money building a good brand without focusing on the most important element: Are we building something people want? The answer was not yet available.

Even though Haseab didn’t make progress with micropay.ai, it ultimately reinforced a meritocratic mindset that rewards resilience and adaptability with success. It also gave him a better understanding of market desires and the philosophy of building fast and failing fast, which would prove crucial in later projects.

Iterate towards profitability

Armed with these lessons, Haseab and his co-founder no longer felt tied to a single idea. However, any new idea had to prove itself in terms of profitability; if it didn’t, it would be scrapped.

This led to the creation of four different products in just two months:

The first platform to achieve profitability was automatic.chat. Auto Chat is a platform that allows non-technical people to create, deploy and monitor AI chatbots. Many of these assistants were already on the market, but users we weren’t very happy with it. “No existing chatbot platform focuses enough on the quality or accuracy of their responses,” says Haseab, “because the main interest of most companies is to provide a simple, simple solution, which drives the AI to train on poor data and generate inaccurate or inconsistent answers.

So, by leveraging advanced AI technology that allows businesses to quickly observe and personalize the information the chatbot relies on, the automated chatbot can avoid potential inconsistencies or inaccuracies and provide a better experience user.

However, during the first weeks of development, Haseab and his co-founder realized that there was no accessible system for companies to monitor the effectiveness of their LLM applications in real time. To this end, they also published llm.rapportan open source tool that allows you to monitor the overall performance and costs of an LLM.

This innovative project attracted the attention of several venture capital firms, was used by dozens of unicorn startups to track their costs and even received the “Best Project” award at the Vercel AI Accelerator (which came with a prize worth over $100,000). But despite all this success, they ultimately decided to abandon the project after its first year, stating that “going the venture capital route without any guidance on how to monetize an open source project represented a huge opportunity cost” . Instead, they chose to leverage what they learned from llm.report to improve autochat.

This created a unique competitive advantage for automatic.chat, as it gave non-technical businesses first-of-its-kind insight into a chatbot’s performance, allowing for better improvement over time. This has propelled autochat to become widely adopted across many industries, from UK-based wealth management funds to a partnership with Heroic Signatures (a subsidiary of Tencent-owned Funcom) to power the AI-driven text adventure game Conan Exiles: Tavern of Betrayal.

Realize your meritocratic vision

By adopting a meritocratic approach that prioritizes the market and rapid iteration over bureaucratic and private interests, Haseab was ultimately empowered to drive real value, rather than juggling interpersonal conflicts within a corporate board. non-profit administration. Its journey of focusing on tangible results and user-driven development has placed automatic.chat at the forefront of AI chatbot technology, proving that innovation thrives when it is not hampered by bureaucratic red tape.

To stay updated on Haseab’s latest and upcoming projects, follow him on X.