One morning in Melbourne, Australia, BuildPass’s CTO, Aaron Vanston, was on a customer call. Halfway through, the customer asked: "Can your system support multiple subcontractors on the same task?"

Aaron paused. He thought it could, but wasn’t certain.

He opened a Slack DM to Grapevine mid-call and typed in the question. Ten seconds later, he had the answer, complete with citations to Notion docs, past Slack threads, and specific code implementation. He confidently responded and moved on.

By the end of the hour-long call, Aaron had fired off five more questions to Grapevine. He answered them all live on the call – no lost momentum, and no follow-ups needed. 

"With Grapevine, I can close the loop incredibly quickly. I can give customers full answers during the call, which means I don't even have to write a follow-up email. It’s faster for everyone."
Aaron Vanston, Co-Founder & CTO, BuildPass

Before Grapevine: Knowledge Everywhere (and Nowhere)

BuildPass is building the world's smartest operating system for construction. They serve general contractors and thousands of construction workers, digitizing everything from worker inductions to safety compliance to quality control.

As a distributed startup, their problem wasn't a lack of documentation; they had years of Slack history, Linear tickets, Notion docs, GitHub code, and support messages. The problem was access. Knowledge was scattered everywhere, so the team had to look everywhere to find an answer. 

The Cost of Scattered Context:

1. Engineering interruptions. Support questions pulled engineers from deep work; 10-second questions turned into 30 minutes of context switching.

2. Slower customer responses. Support tickets couldn't be resolved until 'the one person who knows' finished meetings.

3. Lost deal momentum. ‘Quick’ customer questions stretched to hours of searching, pinging the right person, and waiting for a response. 

4. The founder bottleneck. Aaron had the largest context window as the technical founder, but there was only one of him.

As Aaron put it: "When information is scattered in different apps, code, and threads, it's nearly impossible for our staff to deeply understand the product. And that’s what they need to answer questions confidently and authentically."

The Search for a Knowledge Management Solution That Actually Worked For Everyone

BuildPass tried everything.

Intercom Fin was good for support, but only worked for customer-facing agents. It didn't help the full team understand the product or access technical context.

Notion AI worked well, but Aaron felt it favored written documentation over technical depth. Questions about code architecture or implementation decisions got surface-level answers.

Custom RAG model. The engineering team built a Claude-based bot with access to the codebase. It worked for engineering questions but was too technical for the wider team, and maintaining it pulled resources from building their actual product.

Devin (by Cognition) was impressive for technical troubleshooting but too specialized. Only engineers used it.

The pattern was clear: each tool solved one vertical slice, but nothing connected the dots. As Aaron reflects, "Other AI knowledge solutions were either too technical, not technical enough, or not accessible to everyone. If information is still siloed, what’s the point?”

Aaron needed one tool that could answer:

• Support questions without pulling engineers into Slack threads

• Sales questions about edge cases during live calls

• Technical questions about architecture during production incidents

• Onboarding questions for new hires

• Product questions about complex workflows

He found Grapevine through Gather. BuildPass had used Gather as a virtual office, so he trusted the team. More importantly, Grapevine offered what others didn't: one context layer across docs, code, and communication—surfacing answers where teams already worked: Slack. 

Setup only took 30 minutes. Aaron connected Slack, Linear, Notion, GitHub, and HubSpot, then started testing.

How Grapevine Improved Knowledge Access

1. Proactive Support in Slack 

BuildPass has three key Slack channels where questions pile up:

• Bug escalation: Support/CS raising issues to engineering

• Product feedback: Feature requests and improvements

• Product Q&A: "Does it do this?" and "How?" questions

Before Grapevine, Support and CX members would post questions in these channels and wait for an engineer to respond. It pulled the developers out of focus and made customers wait longer for answers. 

Now, Grapevine proactively monitors these channels. It jumps in with answers (complete with confidence scores and citations) without being asked. If the confidence is high (85%+), the team trusts the answer immediately. If it's lower, they wait for a human to validate.

"Before Grapevine, I would jump in Slack, ask a product question, and hope I wasn't distracting someone from urgent tasks. Now Grapevine answers straight away, and if I want validation, I can chat with the engineering team in the same thread. It changes how fast I can help customers and get work done."
April Riley, Customer Success Lead at BuildPass

2. Resolving a Weekend Incident

One Saturday, BuildPass had a production issue. They saw a performance regression in production and wanted to triage it quickly. Normally during an incident like this, Aaron would search through documentation and dig through old Slack threads, trying to remember what changed recently that might affect the system. 

Instead, Aaron fired questions directly at Grapevine. It answered each one in seconds, and together with the on-call engineer, they identified the issue, applied the fix, and resolved the incident in under an hour.

"Every answer from Grapevine was exactly what we needed. I don't think I could have gotten the same quality from other AI tools, and that's what they specialize in."
Aaron Vanston, Co-Founder & CTO, BuildPass

3. Retrieving Deep Legacy Knowledge

Aaron tested Grapevine with a question only he and a handful of teammates would know: a specific edge case for legacy customers, buried in old code and ancient Slack threads.

He expected Grapevine to say "I don't have enough information" or give a generic answer.

Instead, “Grapevine found the answer immediately,” recalled Aaron. “It just nailed it.” Grapevine provided a complete explanation, along with citations to the old code and the Slack conversation where the decision was made. 

“Grapevine acts like an early-stage founder with all the historical context of the product, customers, and company. It feels like another version of me that anyone on our team can access, without actually waiting for me to be free to reply.”
Aaron Vanston, Co-Founder & CTO, BuildPass

The Full Impact of Grapevine

Since going live, BuildPass logs 160+ questions to Grapevine per week. The agent integrates into key Slack channels, answers direct messages, and proactively replies.

They turned their biggest bottleneck (scattered context across Slack, Notion, Linear, GitHub, and HubSpot) into instantly accessible knowledge. And now that they’re not spending as much time searching for answers, they’re free to focus on more important work.

• Engineering gets fewer interruptions and more time in flow state. 

• Support & CX gain confidence to handle complex questions without escalating. 

• Sales closes deals and onboards customers without losing momentum to follow-up cycles. 

• The founders see their expertise scaled across every team; the context that lived only in their brains now lives in Slack, available to anyone. 

• BuildPass as a company preserves what they care about most: human connection with customers. They're not replacing their team with bots; they're making their people better product experts.

The impact is measurable. As Aaron notes: "We estimated that before Grapevine, our senior engineers were spending 5-10 hours a week answering questions from other teams. That's down to maybe 1-2 hours now. That's 4-8 engineer-hours per week we've freed up—basically a part-time engineer's worth of productivity across the whole team." 

Advice for Founders: Use Grapevine to Empower Your Support Team

Many AI products try to replace customer-facing work. BuildPass took a different approach.

"We're positioned as an AI company, but we're very critical about how we use AI with customers. In construction, human connection matters. We don't want to just chuck a bot at our users; we want to create that human relationship." 
Aaron Vanston, Co-Founder & CTO, BuildPass

According to Aaron, your support team is the first you should set up with Grapevine. The internal value is immediate: agents get faster technical answers without having to tag an engineer. Everyone gets time back in their day. 

This immediately benefits customers, too. Faster internal answers means faster customer responses. When your support team has the same context as your CTO, they can deliver support that builds relationships rather than just close tickets.

"Anything that unblocks my customer success and support teams is a win, and Grapevine immediately did that. It handles the work of finding information so they can focus on the meaningful, human work of supporting our customers.” 
Aaron Vanston, Co-Founder & CTO, BuildPass

Scale Product Expertise with Grapevine

Stop letting scattered knowledge slow your team down. Grapevine unlocks instant access to the information in your tool stack, right where you work: Slack. 

Deploy Grapevine and start asking questions in less than 30 minutes. Start your free trial or chat with our team to see it in action.