An Open Invitation to Try the Customer Support Chat System I’ve Been Building for 5 Years

#webdev #programming #ai #productivity

Hi everyone, I’m the creator of ShenDesk, a self-hosted and cloud-based live chat and customer support system.

This isn't a weekend side project. I’ve been developing and maintaining ShenDesk for over five years now—transitioning from burning the midnight oil after my day job to eventually taking it on as a solo, full-time founder.

I first launched ShenDesk in China back in 2021. The initial version was purely self-hosted. Right after launch, a few early adopters showed interest, reached out, and gave me invaluable feedback. Those few users were my lifeline during the darkest, earliest days; they gave me proof of concept and the conviction that this software actually solved a real problem.

But as you’d expect, early bugs and flaws quickly reared their heads. I poured all my time and energy into fixing issues, adding core features that users actually cared about, and maintaining a relentless, near-weekly release cycle. With every update, I manually reached out to users to help them upgrade their self-hosted instances, eager to validate my improvements against real-world production environments.

By 2022, my confidence was through the roof. I was getting flooded with inquiries, and many users were even asking about commercial licensing. But reality soon hit me hard. Very few users actually stuck around. When it came down to it, the product just wasn't stable enough yet.

The following two years, 2023 and 2024, were a long blur of exhaustion and self-doubt. I was stuck in a frustrating loop: I’d release a version thinking, "This is it. This one is rock-solid. It won't let anyone down." Only to find myself a few days later scratching my head, thinking, "How on earth did this bug even happen?" On top of that, user growth hit a bottleneck. In 2024, there were months where I only saw a handful of new sign-ups.

In the second half of 2024, I decided to tear it all down and do a massive, top-to-bottom refactor. I upgraded the core backend from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 8, fully async-mapped all API calls and message packet handling, and implemented end-to-end encryption. I completely rewrote the visitor-side HTML/JavaScript from scratch, and overhauled the entire web admin dashboard, upgrading it from Vue 2 to Vue 3.

That massive bet paid off in 2025. Things finally turned around. Maybe it was because the major refactor made the system look sleeker and more professional, or maybe it was because years of constant updates and iteration had finally earned people's trust. Growth picked up, and I landed my first two large-scale enterprise clients. One of them now runs a team of nearly 30 concurrent agents, handling close to 10,000 chat sessions every single day. This brought a new kind of pressure: zero-downtime maintenance. When they request a feature or report an issue, I only get one shot at deployment. I have to request a maintenance window—usually just a few minutes—and get the update right on the very first try.

2025 was also the year AI changed everything for me.

AI-assisted coding drastically boosted my development efficiency. For complex architectural issues, I no longer needed to waste hours searching and debugging; AI gave me detailed blueprints and boilerplate code instantly. More importantly, AI opened up a frontier I never thought possible for a solo dev: localization. Before AI, launching a multi-language product required hiring professional translation teams, as traditional machine translation was nowhere near production-grade. But modern AI understands context and intent perfectly, delivering incredibly high-quality translations.

Now in 2026, backed by AI, I am ready to take ShenDesk to the global market.

Beyond the product itself, this shift is deeply personal. Growing up, I used to think my home country was the center of the world. Today, I see clearly that it is not—and it is drifting toward an uncertain future that is difficult to speak openly about. I want to be closer to the wider, open world, at least in spirit. This product that I’ve poured my life into is my lifeboat. It is the vessel carrying me toward the global horizon.

If your business happens to need a reliable, high-performance live chat system, I cordially invite you to give ShenDesk a try. It won't let you down.