Live Help Now

Michael Kansky arrived in the US from Ukraine as a refugee in 1997 with a passion for computers inherited from his mathematician mother. He immediately enrolled in a seven-month accelerated computer programming course using Visual Basic, ASP.NET, and IIS. As a final project, his instructor suggested building a practice application, so Michael built a dating website. Through grassroots distribution (he doesn't recall exactly how), the site grew to around 1,000 users who began requesting features—most notably, a way to communicate with each other. Michael built a basic chat feature to accommodate them, then realized it could also serve as a customer support tool for him to communicate with users about bugs and suggestions.

In 2005, four years after launching the dating site, Michael had an insight: if he found the chat tool useful for supporting his own users, other website operators likely would too. He extracted the chat functionality from the dating site, rebranded it as ZazaChat (named after a word his infant son repeated), and launched it as a free product. For the next four years, Michael worked on ZazaChat as a pure hobby—no business plan, no revenue model, no capital. He coded at night in his basement while his wife supported his vision. What kept him going wasn't money but pure self-fulfillment: the instant gratification of building features users requested and receiving immediate feedback. "It was the fascination and self-fulfillment and just instant gratification of building a feature that is immediately consumed by a user on the other end," he recalls.

By 2009, the server costs for running ZazaChat had grown to $40,000 per year. Michael faced a choice: sell the product or try to monetize it. He chose the latter, flipping the switch to a freemium model at 8 PM on a fateful evening—ZazaChat became free with limited functionality, and paid plans offered unlimited features. Within one hour, about one-third of his 800 users had converted to paid subscriptions, generating approximately $10,000 in MRR. "In one hour I knew I no longer have to consult," Michael says. "I no longer have to work for someone else."

However, Michael made a critical pricing mistake: he had priced the product at $20 per month based on what he, as a consultant earning $130,000-$140,000 annually, would personally be comfortable paying. This was far too low. In 2011, to accelerate growth under the new "Live Help Now" brand (rebranded due to weak brand strength), Michael submitted the product to Top 10 Reviews, an early review-powered directory site. They ranked Live Help Now as the #1 helpdesk solution on the market. The listing went live and within three months, about 1,000 paying customers signed up—a massive validation of product-market fit.

Michael's growth came entirely from organic, tactical methods with almost no marketing or sales team for 12 years. Key tactics included: (1) listing on techbargans.com, which generated 200-250 early customers; (2) the Top 10 Reviews listing, which produced 1,000 enterprise customers in three months; (3) SEO using pillar pages—creating central "hub" pages on topics like "helpdesk software" and linking to 6-12 satellite blog posts, a strategy that drove consistent organic traffic until ~2017; (4) word-of-mouth, as call center agents who used Live Help Now at one company would recommend it when moving to new employers.

But from 2017 onward, growth flatlined. Despite having 2,500 customers, revenue remained stuck between $3M-$3.01M ARR for four years. Michael's analysis reveals the root cause: his own leadership limitations. The company remained extremely flat, with Michael as the sole decision-maker on nearly everything—development roadmap, customer success, operations, other ventures. This consumed all his bandwidth, leaving no mental space for strategic growth. Compounding this, he started Help Squad (a BPO service) in 2015 and eventually launched five additional companies, fragmenting his attention just as Live Help Now's organic growth channels (review sites now saturated and charging for placement, SEO increasingly competitive) began to exhaust themselves.

In 2021, Michael finally took the advice he had long resisted: he hired a CEO (Jason Anil) to free himself from daily operational management. He also built out a proper organizational structure—hiring a VP of customer success, two inbound salespeople, two outbound salespeople, and establishing clear accountability. He now plans to revisit pricing (currently $45 per license across all features vs. competitors charging $200+), invest in true sales and customer success efforts, and focus strategic energy back on Live Help Now rather than splitting himself across six ventures.

Michael's journey illustrates a hard truth about bootstrapped SaaS: sustainable growth to $3M ARR is achievable with tactics alone, but breaking through to the next level requires strategy, team structure, and founder focus. As he reflects: "You can do those tactics in the beginning to get customers and get product-market fit. But once you do, keep your eyes on the ball and strategize."