Asking – A simpler customer support inbox for small teams

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Asking – A simpler customer support inbox for small teams

Hi HN — I’m William, a frontend engineer from Brazil, and for the past few months I’ve been building Asking. Asking brings customer conversations from different channels into one place. It is intended for small teams that need a proper support workflow but don’t want the cost and complexity that usually come with larger platforms. To be transparent, Asking is built on top of Chatwoot. I’m not trying to present its messaging infrastructure as something I created from scratch. I’m using it as a foundation and building a more opinionated product around it, with simpler onboarding, inbox configuration, subscriptions, email setup, and a less overwhelming experience overall. The project started with a question: how much customer support software does a small business actually need? Many products are initially simple, but become expensive as the team grows. Others provide every feature imaginable, but require small companies to adopt workflows and concepts they may never need. With Asking, I’m trying to find a better balance: enough structure to manage customer support properly, without turning it into an enterprise system. One question I’m still exploring is whether small teams genuinely want fewer features, or whether they want the same capabilities with much less friction. The product is still early, and I’d genuinely appreciate direct feedback — especially about what Asking would need before you could consider replacing your current support tool with it.