Last month a Series B fintech company offered us $200k to build their entire customer support automation platform. We said no. It was the hardest business decision I've made this year, and I'm still not 100% sure it was right.
The call that started it
Their VP of Engineering found us through a referral. They'd seen what we built with Loquent — our production voice AI platform handling thousands of automated calls per month for healthcare and dental clients — and wanted something similar for their support operation. The scope was clear: voice AI for inbound support, chatbot for their web app, automated ticket routing, and integration with their existing Zendesk and Salesforce stack.
On paper, this was a dream project. $200k budget. Reasonable 16-week timeline. A technical team on their side that actually understood AI limitations. They weren't asking us to "add AI" to a product that didn't need it — they had a real problem with support costs eating 40% of their gross margin, and they'd done the math on what automation could save them.
I spent three days putting together a technical proposal. We mapped out the architecture: Twilio for voice, Anthropic Claude for conversation handling, Pinecone for their knowledge base retrieval, NestJS for the backend services. I knew exactly how we'd build it because we'd already solved most of these problems with Loquent.
