Founder AMA - Ask us anything!

post by allene on Mar 31, 2025

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.

post by Austin_Conn on Mar 31, 2025

Hi Copilot team! How did you come up with the initial idea for Copilot?

post by lula_w_cpa on Mar 31, 2025

Thanks for doing this AMA
So curious! How did you decide what customers to serve first?

post by tdenesik on Mar 31, 2025

Hey guys, what did you think about going through Y Combinator? Was it worth it?

post by marketing-by-felicia on Mar 31, 2025

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?

post by marlon on Mar 31, 2025

@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 juggling 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.

• One startup I was working at before was building an ad platform of out-of-home advertising. Effectively we were a tech enabled media agency, and there I learned a lot about what’s it like to be on the other side (i.e. the service provider). These experiences gave us the confidence that we knew not only what end client wanted but also what matters to service businesses (at least a subset of them).
• From the very beginning we took a platform-first approach to building, and I think this was largely inspired by my obsession with Shopify (I both love what the company does and also help manage my parents’ Shopify store). From the start we wanted to build a platform for all kinds of creative and professional service firms, and we know from the beginning this was only possible if you eventually build your way to a platform & ecosystem that others can build on top of.

post by neil on Mar 31, 2025

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:

• Tasks API: We’re expanding our API surface with endpoints for the Tasks app which is one of our most requested areas for automation. You’ll soon be able to programmatically create tasks and get notified when they’re updated, making it easier to integrate task workflows into your own systems.
• Custom App Notification View: For teams building custom apps on the platform, we’re introducing more control over how your app surfaces across Copilot. This improvement lets you create tailored views for internal teammates when they see notifications from your custom app in the Inbox which enables richer, more contextual experiences.

post by marlon on Mar 31, 2025

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.

post by marlon on Mar 31, 2025

YC was one of the best decisions we made. Copilot wouldn’t exist without YC.

• The community of founders is incredible. There’s a private forum for founders, local events, and alumni groups. Being a founder is pretty lonely so being able to have a network of founders at the same stage (or 1-2 stages ahead) is extremely helpful. Most challenges you run into others have faced and being able to very quickly find someone that’s solved a similar problem before is super helpful.
• The YC partners are exceptional. In general I think investors tend to be bad if they haven’t started companies themselves or if they haven’t observed many startups failing and succeeding. YC partners are all former founders and they see more startups than anyone else, which means they can give better advice.
• From a fundraising perspective, it’s much easier to raise money on good terms if you’re a YC company. This is especially true if you’re a first-time founder.

post by Kyle_Pearson on Mar 31, 2025

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 unique about the product compared to others that may be looking to replicate it?

post by neil on Mar 31, 2025

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.

post by marlon on Mar 31, 2025

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 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.

post by Andrew_Lowe on Apr 11, 2025

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.