The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2024
Tokyo Techies bets SMBs buy a $9 AI chatbot — Kotae takes #1 on Product Hunt
A Tokyo dev shop productized its AI chatbot for small businesses, priced it at $9 a month, and Kotae hit #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt in July 2024.
Tokyo Techies (Kotae)
What the business is
Kotae is an AI customer-support chatbot built for small and medium businesses: it learns from a website, training files and FAQs, uses retrieval-augmented generation with OpenAI models, and handles roughly 80% of incoming customer questions automatically, with no code and five-minute setup.
Starting capital：Tokyo Techies, an IT consulting and software development firm led by Duc Doba, self-funded the product as its second in-house title after its Klever Suite project-management platform.
How it started
Tokyo Techies, a Tokyo-based consulting and development company, kept seeing the same request from small clients: they wanted modern AI customer support but had no team to build or maintain it. CEO Duc Doba decided the answer was a product, not a project — Kotae (Japanese for 'answer'), a multilingual chatbot priced at $9 per month with a free trial.
What happened
Kotae combines retrieval-augmented generation with OpenAI models, learning from a company's website, training documents and FAQ settings and continuing to learn from live customer questions. The company says it automatically handles about 80% of incoming questions, freeing operators for complex cases, and launched a 30-day free trial with the release in July 2024.
How it ended up
Released on 2024-07-28, Kotae took #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt with 541 upvotes and more than 100 comments, also placing second in the SaaS weekly ranking — an unusually strong global reception for a small Japanese firm's SMB product.
Background
Kotae is an AI customer-support chatbot from Tokyo Techies, a Tokyo IT consulting and development firm led by CEO Duc Doba. It combines retrieval-augmented generation with OpenAI models, learns from a website, training files and FAQ settings, and claims to automatically handle about 80% of incoming customer questions.
The product exists because of a services-to-product bet: small clients wanted modern AI support but could not afford or maintain a custom build, so Tokyo Techies packaged its stack as Kotae — multilingual, no-code, installable in five minutes, priced at $9 per month with a 30-day free trial.
The launch worked globally: Kotae went live on Product Hunt on 2024-07-28 and finished #1 Product of the Day with 541 upvotes and more than 100 comments, also ranking second in the SaaS weekly category — a rare outcome for a small Japanese company's SMB tool.
Kotae was Tokyo Techies' second in-house product after the Klever Suite project-management platform, marking the firm's shift toward selling software it owns rather than only building software for clients.
What has to be true
- Kotae attacked the price gap: enterprise AI support costs a project budget, while $9 a month put the same RAG-plus-LLM stack inside a small business's reach.
- The product reused what Tokyo Techies already knew: years of client chatbot work meant the team could productize a solution instead of selling another engagement.
- A simple wedge — learn from the website and FAQ, then improve from live questions — made the bot useful without a data-science hire.
- Launching on Product Hunt gave a small Japanese vendor a global stage where traction, not sales team size, decided visibility.
What can be applied
A services firm can productize its hardest repeated request: $9-a-month AI support sold to SMBs, and a #1 Product Hunt launch proved a Japanese tool can win global attention.
Aftermath
As of early August 2024, Kotae was live with a free trial and premium plans starting at $9 a month, following its #1 Product of the Day finish on Product Hunt. The case is a benchmark for Japanese SMB software reaching a global audience through product-led launch, though its long-term growth beyond launch week is not documented in these sources.
Sources
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