Use AI voice agents not just for sales qualification, but for mundane, high-volume tasks like confirming registrations for free youth programs. This saves dozens of hours and ensures commitment without tying up human resources.

In a crowded space like voice AI, pitches sound generic. The founder of April found that investors who converted were those who used the product before the first meeting. The direct experience of a working product bypassed skepticism and made fundraising calls short and successful.

In a crowded market, Missive's commitment to syncing all collaborative actions back to the user's email server became its key selling point. This technical choice built trust and loyalty with users wary of getting locked into a new platform and proved to be a surprisingly effective moat.

To manage an infinite stream of feature requests for their horizontal product, Missive's founders relied on a simple filter: "Would I use that myself?" This strict dogfooding approach allowed the bootstrapped team to stay focused, avoid feature bloat, and build a product they genuinely loved using.

Instead of optimizing for retention metrics, April's founders set an extremely high bar for their own use. By ensuring the product was reliable enough for their own critical tasks, like sending investor emails, they naturally built a product with strong user retention.

Staying lean is a deliberate product strategy. Bigger teams may build more features and go-to-market motions, but smaller, focused teams are better at creating simpler, more intuitive user experiences. Focus, not capital, is the key constraint for simplicity.

Traditional software required deep vertical focus because building unique UIs for each use case was complex. AI agents solve this. Since the interface is primarily a prompt box, a company can serve a broad horizontal market from the beginning without the massive overhead of building distinct, vertical-specific product experiences.

The most valuable use of voice AI is moving beyond reactive customer support (e.g., refunds) to proactive engagement. For example, an agent on an e-commerce site can now actively help users discover products, navigate, and check out. This reframes customer support from a cost center to a core part of the revenue-generating user experience.