I run several startups in different fields. They have almost nothing in common, except that every one of them needs support. Customers email us, message us, ask the same questions at two in the morning, and expect answers. So I did what everyone does: I went shopping. I tried the big helpdesks. I tried the ticketing systems. I tried the live chat tools. I tried the AI ones that promised to handle it all.
Every one of them was good at something. Not one of them was good at the thing I actually needed.
The helpdesks were built for support teams of fifty, and I was a founder with a handful of people and a lot of tabs open. The live chat tools were fast and friendly but had no memory of anything. The ticketing systems were serious and thorough and made a five second question take five minutes. And the AI, which was supposed to be the answer, was the most disappointing part of all. It was always added on top. Bolted to the side of something built years before anyone thought about it. It deflected. It repeated. It sent people in circles and called it a resolution.
I kept paying for tools that each solved a quarter of the problem, and I kept doing the other three quarters myself.
So I built it.
Not a wrapper around someone else’s helpdesk. From scratch, with the AI at the center from the first line of code. Because that turned out to be the whole difference. When the AI is added later, it can only see what it is handed. When the system is built around it, the AI sees the customer’s history, your knowledge, your policies, the ticket, the conversation, and the people on your team. It answers from what your business actually knows, and when it shouldn’t answer, it hands the conversation to a human instead of stalling.
Then I did the part I think most products skip.
I gave it to my team and let them use it for real. Not a demo. Our actual support desk, our actual customers, for months. And they taught me something I could not have learned alone: what a founder wants from a support system and what an agent wants from it are not the same thing.
I wanted visibility. They wanted to not lose their draft when they walked away. I wanted the AI to resolve more. They wanted it to stop putting words in their mouth. I wanted reports. They wanted their tasks and their conversations to live in the same place so they stopped copying things between apps.
Almost every good decision in Retily came from that phase. Someone on my team hit a wall, told me, and it got fixed. Then it happened again, a hundred times over.
What exists now is the system I wanted when I started looking, and the one my team asked for once they started using it. It ran our own support desk before it was ever for sale, and it still does. Every feature in it is there because it was needed, not because it looked good on a comparison table.
If you’re a founder with a support problem and a stack of tools that each solve a piece of it, I built this for you. I was you, about a year ago, with too many tabs open.