kai
One of the earliest multimodal Telegram bots — text, voice, multilingual, all before anyone else was doing it
Kai was a Telegram bot launched when GPT-3.5 was the frontier. Multilingual, audio input, audio output — full multimodal before that word meant anything to most people. Possibly the earliest bot to ship that complete UX.
The interface was dead simple and the growth was entirely organic. Hundreds of active users in beta, tons of messages, no marketing. People just found it and kept using it.
Killed it because bootstrapping in Spain is a death sentence. Autonomo cuotas over 300/month before you make a single euro, plus asesor fees, plus multas if you breathe wrong. The product only consumed — you can't sustain microservices competing against VC money when the state taxes you for trying.
TODO
- french
- full write-up with timeline and numbers