How Vanquish Trader cut support costs in half and reclaimed 60% of its founders' time

"In options trading, a delayed payout or an unclear rule can cost a trader real money," says Trevor Feldmann, co-founder of Vanquish Trader. "Support isn't a cost center for us. It's part of the product."

For most of Vanquish's growth, co-founders Trevor Feldmann and Max Mastbaum were in the support queue themselves, alongside a 12-person team handling thousands of tickets a month through Intercom. The hands-on approach had built real trust with their trader base, but it was costing each of them roughly 60% of their week.

"We were the bottleneck in our own business," Trevor says. "Every hour in tickets was an hour we weren't spending on product, partnerships, or the next phase of the company."

They had already tested Intercom's native AI, Fin, and hit a wall. The issue wasn't the bot's language ability — it was that Vanquish tickets almost never live in a knowledge base. "Our traders aren't asking how to reset a password," Trevor says. "They're asking why a specific payout is stuck, or whether a specific trade broke a specific rule. You need to actually look at the account. Fin couldn't do that."

What Vanquish needed was an AI that behaved less like a chatbot and more like a trained support rep — one that could pull up a trader's account, check their activity, reconcile it against Vanquish's rules, and return a specific answer, or escalate cleanly when it couldn't.

"Duckie was the first thing we saw that actually investigates," says Max Mastbaum, co-founder of Vanquish Trader. "It doesn't guess from a help doc. It opens the account, reads the activity, and works the ticket the same way one of our reps would."

Just as important was the onboarding. Vanquish was live inside their existing Intercom workflow within a week, with no integration project, no runbook-writing marathon, and no in-house AI team to staff up. "The Duckie team got us connected, the agent trained on our ticket history, and we were reviewing its work by the end of week one," Max adds. "That kind of speed changed the calculus for us entirely."

For a founder-led company, the biggest blocker to stepping back from support wasn't the bot's resolution rate — it was the fear of something slipping through. A dropped ticket in a prop trading firm isn't an inconvenience; it's a trader losing money and trust in the same moment.

"The thing that actually let us step back was the escalation path," Trevor says. "When Duckie can't fully resolve something, it doesn't just hand off a ticket — it hands off a ticket with full context. Our human team picks up exactly where the AI left off."

That confidence compounds in two directions. Duckie flags its own gaps and proposes improvements the team approves, which means the system gets sharper week over week without engineering lift on Vanquish's side. And every escalated ticket arrives pre-investigated, so the human rep isn't starting from zero. "Our reps stopped being triage and started being specialists," Max says.

Vanquish's agent now handles the full range of trader and admin workflows. Traders asking about payout status get a specific answer tied to their account — often explaining that an open position is holding things up per Vanquish's rules, and what to do next — rather than a link to a FAQ. Questions about account eligibility, rule interpretations, and trade reviews get worked the same way: account opened, activity reviewed, answer delivered.

For the Vanquish team, that investigative depth is the difference between deflection and resolution. "A bot that can't look at the account is just a smarter search bar," Trevor says. "Our customers need the answer, not the article."

Within the first week of going live, Duckie was autonomously resolving 67% of incoming tickets, handling over 1,000 tickets without human touch. By week three, that resolution rate had climbed to 82%. Vanquish has since reduced its support team by 50%, reallocating those resources into growth functions, and the founders have reclaimed roughly 60% of their time. Trevor and Max now review a handful of escalated tickets a day and spend the rest of their week on product and partnerships.

"That wasn't the original goal," Max says. "The goal was to stop drowning. Cutting the team in half while raising the quality of responses was a second-order effect we didn't see coming — and honestly, it's the one that's changed the trajectory of the business."

"Most AI support tools plateau because they can't actually do anything," Trevor says. "They search, they summarize, they deflect. If your tickets require looking at a customer's account — and for most real businesses, they do — you need an AI that can investigate, not just respond. That's the whole game."

"Every founder I know underestimates how much of their week is eaten by support tickets until they step out of the queue and look back," Max says. "If you're a co-founder still answering Tier-1 tickets, the ROI on fixing that isn't just about support costs. It's about getting back the hours that actually move the company forward."

Vanquish is already exploring where else Duckie's investigative approach can apply across the business. Ticket volume continues to grow every month, and for the first time in the company's history, growth on the support side doesn't mean growth in headcount.

"We're just getting started with Duckie," Trevor says. "As we keep growing and ticket volume goes up, we're not worried about scaling support anymore. Duckie grows with us. We're already thinking about where else we can apply it across the business."