Our cofounders @marlon and @neil are here to answer your questions!
Join the conversation and ask about anything you’re curious about — the Copilot origin story, what’s next on the roadmap, what kinds of AI features to expect, and more.
They’ll be keeping an eye on your questions and will answer as soon as possible 
Hi Copilot team! How did you come up with the initial idea for Copilot?
Thanks for doing this AMA
So curious! How did you decide what customers to serve first?
Hey guys, what did you think about going through Y Combinator? Was it worth it?
Hi everyone, our favorite features are the API and platform.
Curious if you can share what we can look forward to on the API/platform side?
@neil and I worked together on two startups before Copilot. Through those journeys we became the clients of several creative and professional service firms, and those experiences led to the seed idea of what would eventually become Copilot.
We worked with recruiters to help us build a team, marketing agencies to rebrand, SEO specialists to create content, immigration law firms to get our visas, trademark law firms to file for trademarks, accountants, bookkeepers, and the list goes on. The individual people we worked with were mostly excellent but we always felt that the user experience for us as clients was terrible. We always thought that the experience for clients should be all-in-one vs jugging a bunch of tools, branded to the business, and just feel modern and polished.
So that’s the main way in which we arrived at the Copilot idea. And then there’s a lot of secondary factors too where it’s a bit harder to say how much influence those experiences had.
Thanks! Great to hear the platform made it to your favorites, it’s a core part of how we think about extensibility and customization.
We recently rolled out major updates, including new billing-related endpoints, and there’s more on the way:
We’d love to hear what else you’d like to see.
From the beginning we wanted to serve a wide range of creative and professional service businesses in the long term but we did want to start narrow. So before we developed the product I remember spinning up ~10 landing pages on Webflow with each focused on a different industry. These pages were barebones with rough designs and a call-to-action to learn more over a meeting. Then we spent a small amount of money on Facebook ads to understand (1) which pages got the most traffic and engagement, and (2) which calls had users most excited. The calls were super helpful and gave us conviction that we should start by serving marketing agencies.
Months later when we launched self-serve we found that all kinds of other industries were also signing up and that’s when our product and positioning became more industry-agnostic. Still, in retrospect I’m glad we started off really focused.
YC was one of the best decisions we made. Copilot wouldn’t exist without YC.
Imagine Co-Pilot in 5 years - what does it look like in your eyes at that time? What’s changed or improved? Who’s your target client/company? What is it creating/replacing/improving for that target client/company? What’s the unique about the product compared to others that may be looking to replicate it?
Hi Kyle, great question!
In five years, I see Copilot as a foundational operating system for client-based businesses. Today, we help consolidate the scattered tools and workflows companies use to work with clients but that’s just the beginning.
Fast forward, Copilot becomes an intelligent, adaptive platform that not only streamlines operations but actually helps run them. We will assist with everything from drafting responses to clients, to preemptively surfacing what actions to take next, to automatically completing parts of workflows based on patterns we’ve seen across businesses like yours. Hopefully with all this businesses can operate faster, with fewer people, and spend more time on high-value work.
Our target client remains the same at its core, modern service businesses that work closely with clients. But the bar for “modern” will keep rising. We’ll serve everyone from solo founders to scaled teams who want a more efficient, more professional, and more delightful way to work with their clients.
Ultimately, we hope our product makes starting and scaling a business feel less intimidating and if we do that right, we’ll see more entrepreneurs take the leap.
Who’s your target client/company?
We love soloproneurs and small businesses and will still serve them, but we’ll also be able to serve much larger organizations with more complex needs,
Imagine Co-Pilot in 5 years - what does it look like in your eyes at that time? What’s the unique about the product compared to others that may be looking to replicate it?
By then we’ll have a much richer ecosystem and app store. There’ll be many more apps to choose from, customizable themes, templates, and more. With all of this customizability an accounting firm that creates a new workspace will be greeted with a vastly different interface vs a marketing agency, for example.
I’m also excited about what AI can enable. Every service business does a lot of repetitive, frustrating, manual work that will just get more and more automated. And then there’s more complex knowledge work where we want to to play more of an assistant role. Imagine that instead of copying things into ChatGPT there was an assistant available directly in Copilot that always knows what context to pass along when you ask a question (the client’s information, message history, files, contracts, etc.).
Finally, I think how service businesses get paid will change and we’ll play a part in that. I think many more service business will embrace recurring subscriptions and offer clients e-commerce inspired store pages where end clients can self-serve make one-off purchase or subscribe/downgrade/upgrade to subscription plans.
Is the AMA still open? If so, I’ll ask this question.
Email still seems to be a key part of the Service Based Business workflow. What I am finding is that, even with the messages app, because clients often email an inbox with requests outside of copilot, it’s still difficult to ensure all clients emails/interactions are easily trackable and attached to certain projects.
What I envision would be ideal for my company would the following: Multiple employee inboxes available in one interface for the purpose of 1) visibility (in case one client emailed one team member and forgot to include other team members), 2) triage, and 3) engagement assignment. The ability to assign emails to a certain “Project/Engagement” (for information completeness and billable time inclusion). And a “Project/Engagement” app that allows for multiple tasks to be tracked under it and for emails to be linked to.
What do you think the future of email is for Service Based Businesses. Do you ever envision copilot leaning into a workflow involved with email integration in this way? If not, what does your ideal workflow look like?