I almost convinced myself a competitor's SEO success was rigged. Then I looked closer, and what I found is more useful than any conspiracy.

I was clicking through one of those "killed by Google" graveyards the other night and landed on Chatbase Old Google product, dead for a few years, nothing unusual. Then out of habit I typed the domain straight into my browser. chatbase.com. It didn't load a tombstone. It redirected to chatbase.co, a company run by a single founder pulling in more than $10 million a year.

That stuck with me. A Google domain pointing at some solo founder's startup. And I'll be honest: after years of grinding on my own products in a brutal market, the first explanation my brain reached for wasn't a generous one. Something like, of course. There's always a hidden hand. Some network I never got invited to.

I let myself believe that for about a day. Then I actually did the research, because that's the job. The real story is way less dramatic, and a lot more useful if you're trying to build anything right now.

There are two Chatbases, and they have nothing to do with each other

That was the first thing I got wrong.

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Google's Chatbase came out in 2017 from Area 120, their internal incubator. It was basically analytics for chatbots, a dashboard to see how your bot was doing, and later some tooling to help build virtual agents and push them into Dialogflow. Google data, Google ML, Google distribution. The works.

They killed it anyway. No drama, no announcement anyone remembers. So yeah, it belongs in the graveyard. That part's correct.

The other Chatbase, chatbase.co, was started in February 2023 by a guy named Yasser Elsaid. Solo founder. He shipped a "chat with your PDF" tool to a Twitter account with 16 followers. No co-founder, no VC. Three years later he's past $10M in revenue with a small team and thousands of paying customers.

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Same name, same space, opposite endings. (Annoying, honestly, from an SEO point of view. Try ranking a brand when a dead Google product is sitting on the same name.)

The mysterious redirect is the most boring part of this

When Google shut Chatbase down, the .com came free and the live company grabbed it. That's the whole mystery. A working business moving into a house the giant walked away from. Half the domains in that graveyard end up exactly like this.

No hidden hand. Just an expired domain and a founder who wanted the cleaner URL. I've done the same thing buying up domains for my own projects.

And yes, a network mattered. Just not the one I was imagining.

Because there is a real answer buried in my paranoid version.

He did grow through a network. A few AI accounts on X reposted his demo, the indie maker crowd picked it up, and it spread from there. Real network, real leverage, no argument.

But it was an open one. Nobody was born into it. He got in by shipping something good enough that people wanted to share it, and then the network did its thing. The door wasn't locked and guarded. It was just a door. Anyone with a decent demo and the nerve to post it can walk through.

That distinction is the entire point. "They had a secret network" explains your competitor and does absolutely nothing for you. "They earned their way into an open one" is something you can go do this week.

I'm not writing this from the sidelines

I run LiveChatAI, which lives in pretty much the same market as chatbase.co. So I'm not romanticizing any of it. I know how hard this fight is, because I'm in it every day.

I also know the open-network thing works, because I've run a version of it myself. My whole approach to growth is SEO, and when we launched LiveChatAI in 2023 we went from zero to around 1,000 visitors a day in eight months. Pure organic. No ad budget. Just content, links, and a lot of patience. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying it because it proves the point: there was no trick. It was slow, unglamorous, compounding work that anyone willing to do it could have done.

And here's the part that never makes it into the success story. Even after a result like that, the to-do list didn't get shorter. It got longer. We still have a mountain of things to ship, fix, rank, and figure out. "It's working" and "we're done" are not the same sentence. They're not even in the same neighborhood.

Credit where it's due, because none of this came from a domain

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read everything above as me shrinking what Yasser built down to a lucky moment and a good repost. That's not what I think at all.

The domain redirect is a footnote. It explains nothing about why people pay him every single month. What explains that is a hundred small things he got right and then kept getting right. He picked the exact problem the market suddenly cared about. He shipped a real first version while most people were still writing threads about what the technology might mean. He charged from day one instead of chasing a vanity user count. He listened to the people actually using the thing and rebuilt it over and over, faster than the ground moved under him. None of that is luck. It's craft, and most founders never get within a mile of it.

And this is the part I really want other founders to sit with: almost none of that work is visible.

When you look at chatbase.co, you see the number. Ten million. You see the logos on the page and the tidy pricing tiers. You don't see the versions he threw away, the features he killed, the support tickets he answered at 2am, the positioning he rewrote five times before it clicked, the stretch of months the graph sat flat while he kept shipping anyway. You don't see the churn he fought or the experiments that failed quietly. The metrics that actually explain his success are the ones nobody screenshots.

That's the real trap of comparison in this business. You watch everyone else's highlight reel while you're living inside your own bloopers. Of course you feel behind. You're holding their visible output up against your invisible process. Their number is real, but it's sitting on a pile of unglamorous work you were never going to see, and that you'd have had to do yourself regardless.

So no, I'm not bitter at the guy. I respect what he pulled off. I just want anyone reading this who's deep in their own grind to stop measuring their backstage against someone else's stage.

The lie that keeps you losing

So, back to my paranoid theory.

When someone wins where you're stuck, the easy story is always the same. They had a secret edge, a network, a door that opened for them and not for you. I get the pull. I felt it for a day.

But it's a trap, and not because it's impolite. It's a trap because it's the one explanation you can't use for anything. It feels like you've figured something out, when really you've just handed yourself permission to stop trying.

The boring truth is the only one worth anything. He was early, he shipped, he posted, he didn't quit. Timing you can chase. An open network you can earn your way into. Execution that's entirely on you.

There's no secret door. There's just the work, done faster and longer than the next person. Which, when I stop being bitter about it, is actually good news. It means the game is open to me too. I just have to go finish my to-do list first.