Founder of
The founder who answers every customer himself
Yahia used to spend three hours a morning on email and still have 300 left. Now every customer gets a personal reply, and email takes him about 30 minutes a day. Here's how.
The problem
Context.dev has hundreds of customers, and Yahia still onboards them personally. When Context.dev got into YC, his launch post took off and the inbound followed: Twitter DMs, 40 shared Slack channels, and a lot of email.
On top of that, Context.dev emails customers automatically when they run low on credits or hit a rate limit, and people reply to those. Some mornings he'd wake up to 400 emails: replies to things he sent, pure inbound, and customer support all mixed together.
He was doing all of it in Gmail. Every hour spent in the inbox was an hour not spent on the infrastructure work that keeps a web data API fast and reliable.
"I realized at some point, okay, it's been three hours, and I've only done a hundred, and there's 300 left."
What he tried
Yahia had never tried an AI email client. At his previous company, a consumer app with 250,000 users, he answered hundreds of emails a day through Gmail and Zendesk. "It was horrible," he says.
He also assumed AI replies wouldn't sound like him. He writes the way he talks: short, casual, nothing polished. He tried Slashy expecting to go back to Gmail.
The shift
The day after he set Slashy up, he cleared 500 emails in about an hour, and every one of them got a personal reply. He dictated what he wanted to say, and the drafts came back sounding like him.
He stopped living in his inbox. Now he opens Slashy a few times a day, answers everyone, and spends the rest of his time on product. If something can't wait, Slashy tells him.
"I'm still writing the emails," he says. "It just happens to be fast."
Before
- › Up to 400 emails every morning
- › Three hours in Gmail, still behind
- › Checking email instead of coding
- › Follow ups he forgot to send
After
- › About 30 minutes of email a day
- › A personal reply for every customer
- › Urgent issues reach him on iMessage
- › Reminders that close deals
"Now I just do like 30 minutes a day, really. I wake up, there's like a hundred, I clear them."
How Yahia uses Slashy
Yahia doesn't use every feature. He uses a few things really well.
Replies that sound like him
Yahia dictates instead of typing. He'll say "write this to this person, this to this person, this to this person," and Slashy prepares all three replies. Because it learns from the emails he has already sent, the drafts come out casual, the way he actually writes.
Urgent emails find him
He doesn't keep his inbox open while he codes. When something urgent comes in, like a customer who was double billed or someone stuck on a bug mid integration, Slashy flags it and pings him on iMessage. Everything else waits until he checks in.
His rules, applied automatically
Yahia only shares his calendar link with people who look serious: a company email address, a real back and forth, not a throwaway Gmail account. He told Slashy once, and now it includes the link in his replies only when those conditions are met.
Customer context in every draft
In Attio, Yahia tracks three numbers for each customer: credits used in the last three days, credits left, and credits used all time. He connected Attio to Slashy and told it what to mention depending on those numbers, so his replies already reflect where each customer stands.
Follow ups that turn into customers
When he sends someone code to try or a fix for a wrong schema, he needs to know they actually tried it, and people forget. Slashy reminded him twice about one thread he had lost track of. It turned out to be a large company, and it became a customer because he followed up.
Why it matters
As Context.dev continues to scale, Yahia still wants to talk to every customer himself. He has already spoken with about half of them at least once, usually right after they pay. Email is where most of those relationships live.
Before Slashy, keeping up meant giving up hours of building time every morning. Now the personal touch costs him about 30 minutes a day, and the time he gets back goes into the infrastructure his customers depend on.
"One feature doesn't really make the product, it's everything together," he says. "That's why I told you guys: don't pivot, I need this."
TL;DR
Three hours a morning in Gmail became about 30 minutes a day. Every Context.dev customer still gets a personal reply in Yahia's voice.