One Year of Building DocsBot with Josh

Last week marked one year since Josh Dailey joined DocsBot as Chief Growth Officer. I started making a list for our annual review, and it just kept going.

Nearly 90 announced product updates. A bigger marketing effort. Five conferences. A physical robot, for some reason.

But the reason I wanted to write this down goes back to the post where I announced I was no longer a solopreneur. A year ago, I wrote about being the person every decision and stalled project eventually came back to. I wanted a trusted partner who could own growth, challenge ideas, and help carry the work of building the company.

Now there's a year's worth of work to look back on. And man, we've done a lot together.

Aaron Edwards and Josh Dailey smiling on a balcony overlooking the river and Austin skyline

Getting what we build into people's hands

The product list is long, and I'll get to it. But a release needs more than code. Someone has to explain what it does, show how it fits a real workflow, help customers get started, and follow up when something doesn't make sense.

That is a lot of the work Josh and our small team have been doing alongside the engineering work this year:

  • Nearly 90 product announcements, covering new capabilities and improvements to things customers already use.
  • 20+ email campaigns and dozens of posts, including product announcements, practical guides, and educational content.
  • Three customer stories, showing how StellarWP, Contractor Foreman, and GravityKit use DocsBot in their businesses.
  • Five conferences, getting out from behind our screens to talk with people about what they're building and where AI can help.
  • DocsBot Week, April 27–May 1, with a week of launches, demos, videos, emails, and live builds. The spring roundup shows how those releases fit together.
  • A major pricing and packaging update, introducing AI Credits, flexible add-ons, expanded bring-your-own-key options, and more room for growing teams. We explained the changes here.
  • Rebuilt onboarding, with automatic website branding and source discovery, guided dashboard tours, and smoother free-trial signup paths.
  • An agency partner program, with client handoff and ongoing management, plus better resources for our existing affiliates.
  • A substantial SEO and content rebuild, refreshing hundreds of existing pages and adding roughly 1,000 more published page URLs across industry, integration, comparison, educational, and localized content. That's an approximate sitemap expansion, not a claim that Google indexed every page.
  • Marketing-site localization into eight languages, including English, so more people can learn about DocsBot in their own language.
  • Our completed SOC 2 Type II examination, another milestone in the work of earning customers' trust.

Some of that work is easy to count. Some of it is a copy revision, a better demo, or a customer call that changes how we explain a feature. It all matters when you're trying to turn something you built into something people actually use.

Giving agents more useful work to do

A big part of the product work this year was expanding what DocsBot can do with a company's knowledge. Answering questions is still central. We also gave agents more ways to research, use tools, and help finish the next step.

  • Deep Research: We launched multi-step research across company knowledge, the web, and data analysis. Then we added question-history research to uncover bugs and documentation gaps, completion notifications, newer models, and usage-based access without a fixed monthly job limit.
  • Dashboard Operator: We introduced the beta of an AI assistant that can configure bots, sources, and settings, with interactive questions to guide its work.
  • MCP: We launched our knowledge-search server, added OAuth for private bots and question-history access, introduced Admin MCP for managing DocsBot from other agents, and added connectors that bring external tools into DocsBot.
  • Skills: We introduced a plain-language Skill Builder and a library for reusing abilities and workflows across bots. Skills and the builder are in beta.
  • Agent API: We upgraded reasoning, tool calls, multi-step workflows, and repeated searches, so agents can keep working when the first search doesn't answer the question.
  • AI Actions: We added controlled web search, Stripe billing workflows in beta, Calendly/Cal.com/TidyCal booking, and contextual action buttons that turn answers into useful next steps.
  • Lead collection and CRM: We added customizable lead capture and team notifications, plus native CRM delivery in beta for HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, and HighLevel.

There is a lot of work inside each of those bullets. A useful action needs clear controls. A research job needs a way to tell you it finished. A builder needs to help someone understand what they just created. Those details are part of shipping too.

Meeting customers where they already are

The website widget is one place people use DocsBot. This year we expanded the channels around it and improved the integrations customers were already relying on.

  • Voice: We launched website and phone Voice Agents in beta, added spoken input to chat, and introduced GPT Live conversations that can listen and speak at the same time.
  • Messaging channels: We introduced Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram integrations in beta.
  • Slack: We added multiple bots per workspace, channel defaults, @mentions, streaming replies, and support for Actions, Skills, and MCP tools.
  • Help Scout: We improved AI replies with conversation logging, summaries, analytics, customer-property context, and controls for when the AI should stay quiet.
  • Automation: We expanded Zapier, added viaSocket, and introduced webhooks for leads, research, escalations, and ratings.

Several of our newer capabilities are still in beta. We're continuing to improve them with customers as they put them to work in real workflows.

Making the knowledge underneath it better

All of those agent capabilities depend on getting the right information into the system, keeping it current, and being able to see what is going on. This was a big year for that less visible work too.

  • Data Explorer: We built visual exploration of training content and question history to spot topic clusters, gaps, overlapping content, and outliers.
  • Search and infrastructure: We migrated to a new vector database, added U.S./EU storage-region selection, introduced semantic question-history search, and improved ranked-chunk inspection.
  • Document processing: We added advanced parsing for complex PDFs and Office files, multi-file and ZIP uploads, individual file processing, and original-file downloads from citations.
  • Knowledge organization: We expanded Source Tags and filtering, added bulk CSV management and custom source titles, and made full-file previews available.
  • Knowledge sources: We expanded Google Drive and Zendesk controls and added connections for Zoho Desk, Teamwork.com Desk, Salesforce cases, Box, Dropbox, GitHub, and Bitbucket Cloud. We also added live access to Scribe knowledge through a Skill.
  • Refresh efficiency: We added scheduled YouTube playlist refreshes and caching for unchanged OCR, image descriptions, and transcriptions to reduce repeat processing costs.
  • Models: We kept adding support from GPT-5.1 through GPT-6.1, expanded our public model library and pricing calculator, and lowered AI Credit costs for several newer models.

These improvements don't all make for a flashy demo. But better parsing, clearer source controls, and less repeated processing make the rest of the product more useful.

Sweating the everyday details

We also spent a lot of time on the things people touch every day. Navigation. Reading an answer. Switching teams. Finding a setting. Getting an invoice to the right person.

  • Dashboard and team management: We redesigned navigation and added quick team switching, custom icons, per-bot permissions, metadata inspection, and printable reports.
  • Chat experience: We improved markdown, tables, formulas, diagrams, multilingual text, accessibility, and scrolling. We added dark mode, copy buttons, zoomable images, better branding controls, and live tool and reasoning activity.
  • Internationalization: We expanded the widget to 50 languages with automatic browser-language detection.
  • Privacy and controls: We added browser-side PII redaction and optional confirmation before opening external links.
  • Developer flexibility: We made it possible to update widget options without reloading or interrupting conversations.
  • Billing convenience: We added automatic paid-invoice emails and a separate accounting recipient.

That is a large list for a small team. And it still leaves out the fixes, support work, and revisions between the announcements.

Apparently the software wasn't enough

Oh, and we built and open-sourced a physical DocsBot robot, gave it an iPhone and Apple Watch remote, and took it to a conference.

Because apparently we needed a hardware project too. 😂

I wrote about the robot and the conversations it started. It runs our voice software in a small, 3D-printed character with a moving head and arms. People could walk up and talk to DocsBot instead of watching another screen demo.

It was a fun way to bring the product into the room. It also belongs on this list because building DocsBot together has included some wonderfully strange projects along the way.

The part that doesn't fit in a release log

Behind all of this were customer calls, support conversations, demos, onboarding sessions, copy revisions, videos, launch plans, and follow-ups.

This is our team's work. Our developers, admins, and everyone helping with the product and marketing have been part of getting these projects across the finish line.

But looking back at the first year with Josh, I can see the difference having a partner has made. There is someone to work through decisions with, challenge ideas, and help carry projects from an intention to something customers can use.

Josh and I have been friends for a long time, and we'd already built a business together before this chapter. I knew I could trust him. This year gave us a much longer list of things we've built together.

I'm grateful for the load he's shared and for how much he cares about where we're taking DocsBot. I'm proud of what this little team shipped this year.

Thanks for building it with me, Josh.

-Aaron