We were losing leads every night. Here is what we built to fix it.

For the first 6 months of building chatbot.witarist.com, we did something a lot of early-stage founders do: we left the website chat offline at night.

We thought it was fine. Most of our customers were in India and the US. We had business hours. If someone came by at 2am, they would just come back.

Then we started doing founder calls and kept hearing the same thing. "I checked out your site late one night and there was nobody there so I just moved on." Multiple times. From people who had eventually become customers through other channels.

We were losing the late-night researchers. The people who do their homework after the kids are in bed. The ones who actually read the docs before talking to sales.

The fix was not complicated. We set up auto-replies that pull answers from our documentation. Someone asks "does it integrate with HubSpot?" at midnight and they get an accurate answer pulled from our actual integration docs, not a generic "we will get back to you."