Baptiste Jamin and the password that became a company

Baptiste Jamin’s first customers arrived because he took something away. In 2015, he and Valerian Saliou were building a customer messaging tool in Saliou’s flat in France. It was unfinished and protected by a password. A friend wanted to try it. Could Jamin remove the lock? He did. The following day, the founders discovered roughly 20 people using their product. The visitors seemed happy. Their carefully guarded work had acquired an audience while they were looking elsewhere.

The friend had a practical reason for asking. Someone had sent him an angry email because his business lacked a customer support chat. He wanted a way to answer. Jamin’s recollection contains no grand unveiling, no crowd waiting for a launch countdown. There was an annoyed customer, a request between friends and a password that had outlived its usefulness. Later, an early user put Crisp on Product Hunt. The little opening became a distribution channel.

There is something pleasingly awkward about a communications company beginning with a locked door. Jamin had built a means of making businesses easier to reach, then placed a barrier in front of it. His friend supplied the correction. Much of the career that followed would involve paying attention to corrections of that kind: small interventions by people who wanted to get on with their day.

A childhood with a command prompt

Jamin’s introduction to computing came at five, when his brother taught him to start the family’s Windows 3.1 computer through DOS. By 12, he was writing code with people he found through open source projects. They made independent video games and two-dimensional game engines. The internet served as both workshop and meeting place. For a child interested in how things worked, it offered collaborators without requiring a formal introduction.

The teenage projects matter because they came before the vocabulary of entrepreneurship. Jamin describes learning to build things, with some attempts succeeding and others failing. A game engine has little patience for an impressive pitch. It either makes the game behave as intended or sends its creator back to the code. That is a useful education for someone who will later charge other people to rely on his software.

His curiosity also produced a less welcome school result. In his account, he was expelled from high school after hacking its network system. He went on to a networking school, worked part time as a developer at Orange, freelanced and joined startups. The episode belongs to his own telling of his early life. Its significance is the sequence afterward: more technical work, several environments to learn from and more side projects.

One of those projects handled disposable email. Meanwhile, Saliou had been working on an open source messaging system. By the time the two teamed up, neither was approaching the idea of online communication from scratch. They had already spent years making software that people used. They also had startup experience that persuaded them that talking to customers was central to keeping a business alive.

The first year cost a car

Their complaint was ordinary enough. Customer relationship tools could be expensive, complicated and dated, especially for a small company. Jamin and Saliou wanted to make it easier to talk to visitors and gather customer communication in one place. The early Crisp combined a chat on a website with a way to manage messages. Its founders were developers, which meant they could build the proposed answer themselves.

They got the project moving over three months in 2015, designing the platform in Sketch and coding its initial software within weeks. It was Jamin’s first experience working with Saliou as a cofounder. There is a distinct gamble in that arrangement: committing to a product while also discovering how another person works. Shared technical experience gave them somewhere to begin. Actual users gave them somewhere to go.

Crisp initially cost nothing to use. Free customers supplied feedback, revealed missing features and helped the founders understand what might eventually be worth charging for. Jamin observed that those customers were more forgiving of an incomplete product. Forgiveness was helpful; free use still generated expenses. Every new conversation had to run on infrastructure someone paid for.

To concentrate on Crisp full time, Jamin sold his car and other belongings. It is an unusually concrete detail in a story about software. A car has a price, a buyer and an empty space where it used to be. Selling it converts a promise about commitment into money available for work. The company’s early independence had a personal cost before it became a point of pride.

“We also chose to bootstrap instead of fundraise.”

Baptiste Jamin, 2018

With little money, the founders built internal tools for tasks such as their help centre, service status and finances. Then customers asked for some of those tools themselves. Necessity had produced additional things to sell. The appealing part is how unceremonious the discovery was: make something useful for your own operation, let people see it, listen when they ask for a version.

About a year after the start, Crisp introduced a paid model alongside its free plan. The transition followed the information gathered during that first year. People had already shown which parts of the product they used and what they wanted added. The founders were selling into an existing conversation. The customer relationship software had been conducting a customer relationship of its own.

The useful distance between signup and use

Jamin’s account of early growth includes a number more revealing than a registration total. Among people who installed Crisp on their websites after signing up, 51 percent were still using it ten weeks later. The founders consequently concentrated on getting people through installation. The product needed to become part of a working website, rather than another account someone opened and forgot.

That required technical and interface work. It also gave the team a specific problem to solve. A signup is flattering, but an installed chat has a job. Someone must be able to put it in place, understand it and answer the messages it produces. Improving that path connected the founders’ engineering habits to the business’s survival. The work of growth could happen inside the product.

The small “Powered by Crisp” label beneath the chatbox helped spread it further. A business using the tool could expose another potential customer to it. Jamin also credited the first Product Hunt attention and repeated work on the landing page and application. These were several routes working together, with the product itself participating in how people discovered it.

His advice to new entrepreneurs was correspondingly practical: build side projects, gain experience and pay attention to customers. He treated a project that never became a startup as useful preparation anyway. There is relief in that outlook. A teenager’s game engine need not acquire a business model to justify the hours spent making it work.

Nantes, with the world attached

By 2018, Jamin described a five-person company whose freedom had allowed the founders to move between locations. Sometimes they worked together; sometimes they did not. He had also lived with his cofounder for months. He said he wanted to become more settled again. Remote work, in this version, included both travel and the desire to stop travelling.

Nantes became the company’s home base. In 2019, Jamin described refusing approaches from venture capital firms because the founders wanted to retain control. Crisp’s own account places the opening of its Nantes office in 2018 while retaining a distributed team. The city supplied a fixed point for a business whose customers and colleagues could be elsewhere.

On his personal site, Jamin describes a full-stack approach encompassing code, interface design, user experience, growth and support. That range helps explain his interest in a customer’s path through a product. It also leaves room for a life outside the inbox: he says he plays music and drives fast cars on a track. The founder who once sold a car still lists driving among his pleasures.

A familiar question, a new kind of answer

The later work at Crisp extends the original aim of making customer communication easier. In his 2024 discussion with Anna Nadeina, Jamin described AI uses that included conversation summaries and an assistant for people working inside an inbox. A summary can save an agent from rereading a long exchange. An internal assistant can help a colleague retrieve information. Those applications give the technology an ordinary workplace task.

He also argued for reducing avoidable support requests through a useful knowledge base. The ambition sounds curious coming from the maker of support software: help customers reach an answer without always needing a conversation. Yet it follows the original problem. A visitor looking for a price or an opening time wants information; the business needs a reliable way to provide it.

In July 2026, Jamin discussed AI search and Crisp’s Hugo agent with Pascal Levy-Garboua. The conversation included turning down an acquisition offer the previous year, and his concern about charging for each resolved support request. The incentive matters: closing a conversation and helping a customer can become different objectives. His position puts pricing into the same discussion as product behaviour.

The scale has changed since the password came off. That July episode described Crisp as serving 600,000 businesses. Jamin’s recurring subject remains the encounter between software and someone who needs it to do a job. He began by letting a friend into an unfinished tool. The friend’s customers followed. Years later, with AI able to supply the next reply, the useful question is still what the person on the other side came to ask.