Charla Live Chat helps you connect with your site visitors, whether for sales or customer service support. You get all you need to provide the best customer experience, visitors insights, automated chatflows, mobile apps for agents on the go.
Hi All 👋,
I'm Yehia and I'm very excited to share with you the soft launch of Charla Live Chat. I've been working on the product for the last 18 months, and I think it's now ready for prime time. Really looking forward for the community feedback.
1. The Product Story
The Live Chat software market is crowded. You have several startups that provide the basic live chat service, big companies that offer it as part of their CRM suite, and new AI ventures that focus on bots interactions, and can hand over to live agents when needed.
And yet it’s hard to find a product that would just cover all what a small business owner needs, at a reasonable price point, and with a great user experience. So the aim of Charla is to cover this gap, mainly targeting startups and small businesses. First release covers:
🤖 Automated Chatflows - Qualify your site visitors before the Agent steps in.
🔎 Visitor Insights - Know where your visitors are from, how long they visited your website and which pages.
💬 Proactive Chatting - Initiate the chat with the current visitors.
⌚Scheduling Capabilities - Set Offline/Online hours depending on your Agents schedule.
🌈 Widget Customization - Choose from different icons/colors/positions.
📱 iOS and Android Apps - Chat on the go with your site visitors.
🛒Magento and WordPress extensions, with Shopify coming soon.
2. The Personal Story
I have always wanted to experiment with building and launching a SaaS business. However once you start your corporate career, you hardly found the time to put in a side project. And as I wasn’t very much of a risk taker, I didn’t like the idea of going full time on a startup and raise money for an MVP, just wasn’t fond of the liabilities involved.
Back in 2016, I was building an e-commerce mobility solution (http://buildyourapp.today/) for retailers, and I was mostly acquiring customers from PPC campaigns. I was looking for a Live Chat service to add to the product website, but haven't found one that covers all my needs. Since then, I decided that my next side gig would be a Live Chat web application.
So a couple of years after, I finally got motivated to start the project. I made a plan, 2 hours per day for one year to spend on the project. Cutting off Netflix and social media as possible would give me the 2 hours I need in a typical day. The consistency was the hardest part but here we are 🥳.
3. The Engineering
The Backend
I have always found C# to be miles ahead of Java/Php/Ruby in terms of language features. The .NET framework is cross platform, very well maintained, with a very strong community. I personally prefer it over Laravel or Rails. SignalR is also maintained and was built officially by Microsoft, and it's one of the libraries the project heavily relies on for messaging.
I followed a very simple architecture. Web Apis for both the desktop and mobile apps. EF Core for the ORM. IdentityServer4 for identity management, which I later regretted, consumed a lot of time to implement, was hard to setup, and wasn't necessary at this stage of building the product.
The Frontend
Angular works well for large scale application. Both the desktop and mobile apps are built on Angular. NgRx works great for the state management, was tricky at first to get used to all the actions/effects/reducers, but it makes everything very consistent and prone to future issues.
Charla widget is also based on Angular. And since webpack self-contains everything, the widget works on all websites, with no conflicts with other angular versions, or jQuery or react,
The Mobile Apps 📱
For the mobile apps I used Capacitor + Ionic, always made sense to create hybrid apps with the same code base. I built the iOS/Android in a few weeks thanks to Capacitor + Ionic. Shoutout to @maxlynch for such a great platform.
CI + Logging
I used GitHub actions for the continuous integration, very easy to setup, took a couple of hours
to setup a development/testing/production workflows. For the logging, I initially used ELK stack, but man it was a resource hog, needs 4gigs of ram to run properly, so I ended up switching to Azure App Insights, which did the job alright.
4. Where are we?
A thousand user signed-up during the beta phase. The plan is to get a couple of thousands more on the free plan in the next three months, to make sure everything is working as it should, and I can later introduce the paid plans.
I'm planning to use Google Search Ads as the main acquisition channel. However how the cost per acquisition and the life time value compares is still something to discover 🤦♂️ in the next few months.
So what's next? Validate the business model, improve on the product with contacts management, knowledge base, tickets, integrations, email replies.
Shout out to @stephsmith , your article helped a lot when this was just an idea.
Happy Holidays Everyone
Yehia
Cairo - Egypt
Doing Content Right