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- [00:00]
Kieran
This is my inbox. Normally, before Quora, I was not an inbox zero person. I had just thousands of emails here in my inbox. And if you click into Quora, you go here.
- [00:11]
Dan Shipper
And so for people who are listening, he clicked into Quora. And what you see is a bunch of different sections of this brief and each section takes a bunch of emails that we think fit that section and then categorize it together and summarize it.
- [00:24]
Kieran
We were in an off site in Nice in France. Let me just build this very basic. It took me like a few hours the day after. So in Nice, we were sitting at a cafe drinking a wine like, like you do in France, and we were checking our inboxes on our phone on the Gmail app and we were like, holy. Like, like. It feels cleaner.
- [00:45]
Dan Shipper
It's so quiet.
- [00:46]
Kieran
Yeah, it was quiet. I remember.
- [00:48]
Brandon
I remember getting my first brief and thinking, this is so much better than what my life was foreign.
- [01:10]
David
This podcast is supported by Google. Hey everyone, David here, one of the product leads for Google gemini. Check out VO3, our state of the art AI video generation model in the Gemini app, which lets you create high quality 8 second videos with native audio generation. Try it with the Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan. Sign up at Gemini Google to get started and show us what you create.
- [01:40]
Dan Shipper
Welcome to the show, everybody.
- [01:42]
Brandon
Thanks, Dan.
- [01:43]
Kieran
Thank you. Glad to be here.
- [01:45]
Natasha
Thanks for having us.
- [01:46]
Dan Shipper
So today is a really big day. We are officially gaing Quora. Quora is the AI email assistant that we've been building for the last, basically almost the last year. It's been in beta for the last six months. It's had 10,000 people on the waitlist. Now it has like over a thousand daily active users, which is incredible. It's like one of the most sticky products that I've ever seen and it's something that everybody on the team uses every single day. It's like a total delight to use and it's so fun to finally have it out where anyone can use it. And so I wanted to bring the whole team on the show to talk about what the product is, how we got here, what it's been like to build it, what we've learned and where we're going. Let's go around and everyone introduce themselves. Brandon, you want to start?
- [02:31]
Brandon
Yes, I'm Brandon. I run the studio here at Every and I help run the consultancy.
- [02:38]
Kieran
Karen, I am the ga. I'm building Quora. I'm writing the code. I started writing all the code by Myself doing support, features, everything, and then got Natash on board to join the team to ship features because we felt there was something we needed to go quicker. Even with AI, you still need to have people. So that's when Nitesh joined.
- [03:08]
Natasha
Yeah, and I'm Nitesh and I'm the engineer. An engineer at Quora helping Kieran. I'm the newest member of the team. I'm having fun helping Karen build cool stuff in Kora Basic.
- [03:19]
Kieran
Basically, we're just jamming on, like, how can we use AI? The best way to build Core, which is really, really cool.
- [03:26]
Dan Shipper
Yeah. Basically, for anyone who's been following along with the podcast, like, they actually don't build anything. They just tell Claude to build stuff now. So if you're interested in how Core has gotten built, like all the details, definitely go check out an episode we published like three weeks ago on Claude code. But yeah, like, I want to start with showing people the product because I think that's the best way to get to understand it and get excited about it. So, Kieran, maybe share your screen and while you're doing that, I'll tee it up a little bit. I think a good way to think about what Quora is, is it's sort of like having a chief of staff in your inbox for 15 bucks a month instead of 150k a year. And the thing that it does for me is I just have that kind of like, it's handled feeling where I'm just like, someone is taking care of my email so that I don't have to think about it and I can focus on stuff that actually matters to me. And Quora does three things. One is it screens your emails, so it decides what needs to be in your inbox and what, what you don't actually need to see. So, like, anything urgent, anything you need to reply to from a human gets to your inbox. It also, the second thing it does is it pre drafts replies. So when an email comes in that you need to respond to, it will take a look at your, your writing style and previous emails you responded to like that, and try to draft a reply for you. So it saves time that way. And then twice a day it sends you a brief summarizing all of the stuff that comes into your inbox that you need to read, but you don't need to respond to. So you sort of just scroll through your email and in 30 seconds you've read through your email and it's done. And that's what Kieran's looking at. Right now. So, Kieran, do you want to just go up to the top and, and, and talk about what we're looking at?
- [05:07]
Kieran
Yeah. So there, there are two, two, two things here. This is the product Quora, but obviously you have your inbox as well. So this is my inbox. Normally, before Quora, I was not an inbox zero person. I had just thousands of emails here in my inbox. And now the. Mainly. So I was on vacation last week. That's why I didn't read all my briefs. But mainly what I see here are briefs and everything else that's in here I should do something with. So, and this is funny, like, we were. I was invited to Cora as well. So really the idea is to get to the most important things in my inbox and open the brief and look at my brief.
- [05:57]
Dan Shipper
Can you show us what that brief email looks like?
- [06:00]
Kieran
That's actually. So what I do is I can open my brief within Gmail and it will give me a number. Like 84% of my emails today are handled. And it will give an overview of the stuff that's in the brief. So I can kind of see, like, hey, I can scan over it. And everything important will also be highlighted. So you don't need to go into Quora, but you can. And if you click into Quora, you go here and you can dive deeper.
- [06:39]
Dan Shipper
And so for, for people who are listening, like, he clicked into Quora and what you see is this really beautiful, like, oil painting of a sky background. Like, it's a very kind of different aesthetic for email software. And then there's a bunch of different sections of this brief and each section takes a bunch of emails that we think fit that section and then categorize it together and summarize it. So if you go back up to the top, Kieran. So, yeah, talk about, um, talk about each section.
- [07:13]
Kieran
Okay. So, yeah, I, I jumped to Wednesday, the afternoon brief. You can see the background changed as well to afternoon. And the most important stuff is on the top. It's called important info. Uh, it means you should know about it, but it doesn't mean you have to take action. Like anything that needs your immediate attention or action will stay in your inbox. That is like time sensitive. Uh, but everything that's important to know. Like, for example, Chase said something to me. So everything important is here. This is, this is the one you always want to look at. And everything else is kind of. It will get the most important stuff for you. Summarize. So you can actually read everything else, like newsletters. If you receive 30 newsletters per day, this is an easier way to scan your newsletters for payments. You just see a summary of what happened. Like, where. Where did the money flow? Who did you pay? Did you receive money? And you can see here also, like the. This is in English. This is in Dutch. So if. If things are in a specific language, if you are not all receiving English, it will summarize it in your. In your language. And it's really fun because what we try to do here is we. We try to give you the highlights of what the newsletter says and, like, the most important points and give you enough information to say, hey, I want to learn more. I want to see more. So let's see. I want to learn more here. I can click into it and open this email or newsletter and read it in here, or I can jump to Gmail and read it from there.
- [09:11]
Dan Shipper
One of the really cool things about this, at least for me, is obviously, like, we publish a daily newsletter, and you can even see every here. The Man Inside the minds of the people Building AGI is one of the newsletters here, and that's every. And it's an overview of a previous episode in this podcast, which is kind of fun. And what's really cool for me is, like, these summaries. I spent a lot of time with Kieran just like, refining the prompts to be like, how would I, as a writer, summarize these emails? And it's a really interesting, like, different kind of writing task where you're not writing a specific piece, you're writing, like, many pieces. It's like, it's meta writing. And that's one of the things I think we can bring to emails, is we have a writer sensibility inside of every. And that that comes into how we summarize your emails for you. So you're getting the best summary possible of what's in your inbox.
- [10:07]
Brandon
I think the other thing that I really like about what we did with Quora was it's kind of like this extremely opinionated way of using email, starting from a place of. All of us hate email. We don't want to be doing email. Yeah, how can we? But, like, it wasn't like we were like, let's make an assistant. You know, it wasn't. It didn't start there. It was just like, very, very first principle. How do I want to be interacting with this thing that is a open door to anybody in the world? And like, I remember our first pitch was it's a to do list written by everybody. But Yourself.
- [10:47]
Dan Shipper
Email. Email. Email is traditionally. Email is a to do list written by everyone but yourself. Yeah.
- [10:52]
Brandon
And so I feel like just over the past year, like, we all started, we had like the initial hunch of an opinion of how we wanted to manage our inbox, which was that we didn't want to be distracted. And that has sort of like grown into this fully fetched product that is 100% opinionated, which is why when we have people use it, you know, 80% of people that use it, they absolutely love it. And it like, literally changes their relationship to email, which is how I would describe my experience with it. And then there's another 20% that absolutely hate it. And we're like, totally okay with that because it's so opinionated and you're just like, not a good fit. But that's made an amazing sticky product.
- [11:34]
Kieran
Yeah.
- [11:34]
Dan Shipper
I think the thing that it reveals is how much we have this anxious attachment to our email inboxes.
- [11:41]
Brandon
Yeah.
- [11:41]
Dan Shipper
And. And so it's actually very uncomfortable to use it for the first time. But over time, what I've learned is I don't actually need to be looking at my inbox all the time. That was just like a. That was a lie. Yeah. And my life is way better when I'm. When I'm not. Because I know Quora is handling it for me and I know, Kieran, you have this, this story of like the first time that we, like, realized this, the first time we tried having Quora handle our emails. Do you want to. Do you want to tell that story?
- [12:11]
Kieran
Yeah, absolutely. So we started Quora first as a. Like, let's generate drafts for your emails because we thought that will solve all our problems. But then we still felt like, I still have hundreds of emails in my inbox, so clearly there is more to it.
- [12:29]
Brandon
And that was really important because we realized, wait, only like 10% of emails that we all receive we actually need to write responses to.
- [12:37]
Kieran
Yeah.
- [12:37]
Brandon
Which means the bigger problem is this other 90% that you need to sift through. That was a huge unlock.
- [12:42]
Dan Shipper
Yeah.
- [12:43]
Kieran
So we realized that and you were like, okay, how are we going to do it? And we came up with this idea of a brief. Like you get a brief once a day or twice a day. And we were in off site in Nice in France, and I was like, let me just build this. This was in the Cursor Composer times. So it was this very ancient AI times, but Cursor composer helped me create a very rude version of basically scanning an email, see if it's important or not archiving it automatically in your inbox and then sending you an email with a summary of it. Very basic. It took me, like, a few hours.
- [13:31]
Brandon
It's.
- [13:31]
Kieran
It's not too hard to do that because it's. Yeah, the first version was easy and I enabled it for my own account. I was like, dan, are you sure you want to enable this on your account? Because, like, it will go hard. It will archive maybe a lot of things. And Dan was like, yeah, yeah, I understand. I'm like. And Brandon said, I want to go. And then Brandon jumped in, and Dan was still like, okay, if Brandon does it, I'll do it too. So I was like, okay, well, we'll add three people and I think one other. So we had four people. We were. We were all there. And the day after. So we didn't really understand what was going to happen. But the day after, we were in Nice. We were sitting at a cafe drinking a wine, like, like you do in France, and we had, like. We were checking our inboxes on our phone on the Gmail app, and we were like, holy. Like, there. Like, it feels cleaner. We still had that urge to check and to refresh and to refresh, but there was nothing. It was just.
- [14:37]
Dan Shipper
It's so quiet.
- [14:39]
Kieran
Yeah, it was quiet.
- [14:40]
Brandon
I remember. I remember getting my first brief and thinking, this is so. It needs so much more work, but it's so much better than what my life was like before. And for me personally, I feel like I've been on this crusade of, like, sort of trying to deny this, like, previous version of myself where I'm, like, super on top of my email and, like, I'm trying to, like, create these new habits where, like, doing great work is important versus just, like, doing fake work of, like, constantly maintaining inbox zero. And this was the first time where I was like, oh, I. Doing that on my own is impossible. But Quora just forces me to do that. And I feel like that was the first time that I was like, this is just a better lifestyle. Like, it was like a lifestyle change, not just, like, product change.
- [15:31]
Kieran
It felt emotional. It. Like, we felt chill, like we could feel it, which is really cool if software makes you feel a certain way. Clearly there is something like, yes, it needed a lot of work.
- [15:43]
Brandon
I have a direction that we could go, which is we. So we did this and then we, like, we invested in making it prettier and refining the summaries and building all this functionality, and it got really good at, like, it just got to be a really smooth experience. But we all had one problem, and. And a lot of our customers had one problem, which is it knows me, but it doesn't know me, like, super, super well. And sometimes it just.
- [16:15]
Kieran
The context, like, the context thing and the anxiety.
- [16:19]
Brandon
Yes, we sort of also had this anxiety of, like, am I missing things? And that was because, like, it was doing some personalization, but it wasn't going, like, really, really deep on that. So we decided to build Assistant, which is, you know, a tool that now lives inside of Quora. And we decided to, like, go really hard at customizing your experience during onboarding. We have a beautiful onboarding that, like, you know, people will now get to experience. But maybe, Kieran, you can talk a little bit about what Assistant does. Maybe we can even show it. And then I think this is, like, a pretty unique product that exists. Maybe you can talk about how the two of you went about building it.
- [16:58]
Dan Shipper
Yeah, let's. Let's definitely show the Assistant. And I think one of the. One of the things I love about it is that it also is in my inbox. Like, I can just email it and it will reply. And so, like, the reason we call it a chief of staff is because it does all the things you would expect an executive assistant type to do. Like, it. It automatically categorizes emails correctly. It knows what you should see and what you shouldn't see. It writes the briefs, all that kind of stuff. But the thing it. It can also do is it's. It's an AI in your inbox. So, like, for example, if I get a big, long email from a lawyer, I just, like, forward it to Quora, and I'm like, can you summarize this for me? And I get something in line that, like, tells me what the lawyer is trying to say. It's really good at that. And it even. It forms memories and it keeps track of who you are. So it's. It's. It's pretty powerful. So take it away. Kieran. I'd love to maybe, maybe show us the Assistant.
- [17:49]
Kieran
So, yeah, so we. We built all. We built a brief, we built a drafting, but we really realized the power allies with, like, it really understanding who you are, because people loved it. But comments mostly were like. Like, I needed to do something very specific to me. And having software be very generalized and opinionated is good, but there should be also, like, room for your personality. And, like, for example, I have a category here called Daycare. I get photos of my daughter every day, which is nice. Like, it's just me and not everyone has kids. So some people have investors that they talk to a lot. I have kids, pretty similar, honestly. I mean, they want a lot of attention. So. So everyone wants to personalize things within the realm of our opinion of, like, this is how it should be. And we realized that actually all of that context is already there. It's in your email. Like, like your email is the story of your life. That's kind of how we launched and that's very powerful. And you lose track of pieces of that story if you just don't look at your email. And Quora can use AI to pick out things, create memories and learn about you. And that was the realization. So we just launched the assistant and like a simple interaction could be, for example here, like, this is about Claude code, new features, it's categorized in other. And other is like a little bit weird category where, like, it doesn't really understand where it should be. But like, I think it's important. So make it important info.
- [19:42]
Dan Shipper
So for people who are listening, basically, like in the brief we had, Kieran had a Claude code email that he clicked a button and it automatically opened up the Quora Assistant on the right side. And basically in the Quora Assistant, it's like, hey, like, I see you want to talk about this email. Like, what do you want me to do with it? And Kieran said, like, make it important, make it categorize it as important. Um, and then it just automatically knows how to do that and it shows up in the brief. And he can be confident next time an email like that comes in, it's going to go to the right place.
- [20:15]
Brandon
He also equally could have just said, this is an important email for me.
- [20:19]
Dan Shipper
Yeah.
- [20:19]
Brandon
And it would know.
- [20:20]
Dan Shipper
Cool.
- [20:20]
Brandon
That means it needs to be. It will might actually ask him, is it so important that you want to see it in your inbox or do you just want me to categorize it as important info? And then you could respond and say.
- [20:29]
Dan Shipper
And it in fact did do that. It did ask him if he wants to return this email.
- [20:35]
Kieran
Yeah, do you want to return this to my inbox? Because sometimes it's like, hey, this is very important. Like, that can mean different things. It can mean like, I need to respond to it, never brief it. I want always to get this in my inbox. Or it needs to be like, there are all these flavors. And the nice part is that the assistant will ask you these questions. Like, we just launched assistant and this is version one and we're going to like go way further with this. But this is a very easy way to Interact with.
- [21:06]
Brandon
One of my personal favorite use cases is like my, my work changes over time, like what I'm focusing on. And just the other day, you know, I realized that like pretty consistently Quora will brief cold emails from people who want to be eirs at every. And I'm like, I want to sort of see those right away because like that's important to the work that we do. So. But I can't define Decora. It's from this domain, it's from this email address. And I literally was just like, hey, you know, people who are cold emailing specifically about every product studio and want to be ears, I want to see those emails right away. And it made like a vibe based rule for me about that. So it's, it's really, the assistant is really dynamic and it allows you to fully customize what your experience is. By the time we launch this, this, this podcast, you do that during onboarding. So like right out the gate, it's like this really personalized experience which I feel like is a, was a huge learning lesson for us.
- [22:07]
Dan Shipper
Yeah. One of the things I think I would love to hear Kieran and Natasha, I'd love to hear you guys talk about is this kind of categorization. Sounds simple. Like if you're listening to this or watching this, you might be like, well, Gmail does some categorization for me. I can set up filters or whatever, but it's actually a really hard problem to put the right email in the right place at the right time. And what Quora can do is actually a lot different from what like a Gmail or a superhuman can do with splits, where it can do this sort of like rule based. Like if it comes from this domain, don't brief it. But it can also do what Brandon referred to earlier, which is vibe based, which is like, basically take a look at it and let me know what you think it is and then it will put it into the, put it into the correct category based on its like glance at the email. Do you guys want to talk about that?
- [22:57]
Kieran
Yes. So what I hear sometimes is like, oh, great, you spent like months building an email classifier. Isn't that very easy? I can vibe code that in a weekend. And yes, that's what I did with the first version. I Vibe coded that in four hours and, and there it started. So it is really hard. Like there are many moving parts. There are many kinds of systems working at play. We have like traditional algorithms like that, just rule based. We have more modern LLMs that are English based and they all need to work in harmony and do the right thing. And what is the right thing? The right thing is also different for everyone. Everyone has their own right thing and is contextual. So it's like, okay, great, how do I even know this works? Like, yes, when we were using it, it was great. Like we were just complaining. If something was wrong, we fixed it. But we're with thousands of users now. There's absolutely no way if like even 10 people per day complain about something wrong that I manually go in and fix it. So it is about building a system.
- [24:17]
Natasha
That.
- [24:20]
Kieran
Works where people can give feedback, that learns, that understands who you are, what you find important, listens to signals that you do. Like it's a pretty extensive, complex system and that's important. We need all these things to work together. We cannot just use LLMs. Because another obstacle is LLMs are expensive and if you have thousands of users, like we were on target to like burn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just in LLM costs. And then Brandon was like pinging me in private, like, hey, the bills are in. Can you review the costs? And there was like a subtle hint of like, do we really need to spend all of this money? And then I was like, yeah, okay, let me spend a day, let me do, do some work, let me analyze things. And like that's part of building LM apps. It's like you run against all these and then you have LM use limits. Like you can like certain models have limits. And we, we were just using so many tokens that like anthropic at some point just said no, you're like, you're over the 500 or the 400,000 tokens per minute. Like every day I would get that and, and, and you're like, oh, we're not, we didn't even start. So then you start like increasing limits, moving things around, reduce. Like there are so many things going on here that seems very easy on like a one to one skill. But if you scale to thousands of users, suddenly becomes very different. Yeah, and, and, and yeah, and there are many things, like we do embeddings, we do like pulling in similar emails. We, we have to hopefully make the best decision and evaluate that as we go.
- [26:20]
Brandon
My favorite sort of like way that this has presented itself recently is like in this little like debate that you got on X Kieran where someone was like all this for an email summarizer. And I just, I love making products that are so complicated in the back end that they can be described as simple, as simply as Just an email summarizer. And it's so naive to be, like, the most beautiful products in the world are so simple that you can describe them as, you know, in three words. But what's actually happening in the back end is so complex. And it's also indicative of, like, what you and Natesh do to build this. I feel like you guys are, like, truly at the tip of the spear in terms of how you're actually going about building this functionality. And I feel like every week you're. You're not. You're not just launching new features for Quora, but, like, new ways of building those features or reviewing those features. I mean, there's so many of them. But I wonder if, like, maybe, Natasha, we haven't heard from you. Like, is there like a single thing, that single tool that you and that you and Kieran are using that, like, really blew your mind in terms of the capabilities of building with AI?
- [27:34]
Natasha
Yeah, definitely. There were, like, two instances, I would say. So both of those were, you know, Kieran led me into those tools and I was like, okay, my mind is blown. This completely changes how I'm working. So the first time it happened was with the tool we're developing Monologue, and it's a simple, like, voice to dictation, voice to speech thing. And. But it massively changed the way I was interacting with AI models because, you know, like, when I'm speaking, I can give so much more context. So that. That was the first.
- [28:17]
Dan Shipper
Let me just jump in, Jump in there. I think that's just. Just for people who are listening that don't have context. So we, we have another product we're incubating at every called Monologue that does. It's a smart dictation app, so you can talk into it and then it will turn what you're talking about into text. And so, Natash, I think what you're saying, talking to your code base was a thing that you maybe, like, hadn't considered doing, but Kieran, literally, his hands don't even touch the keyboard. And so that's been a game changer for you. Like, what does that. What is that? Like, why is that so much better?
- [28:49]
Natasha
Yeah, it's just better because, you know, when you're typing, like, I can type, like, really fast. I can touch type, all of those things. And I've been typing, like, my whole life. But when you're typing like, you get lazier. And with these LLMs, context is the king. So with Speech, I can ramble on for a minute or two, and every Time when I ramble, like, I. It just gives me a better output. Like that is fundamentally a better way to work with LLMs, whether it comes to code, I feel, or anything else. So that was the first time it blew my mind.
- [29:27]
Dan Shipper
Sweet. And then the second one I assume is Claude Code.
- [29:30]
Natasha
But yeah, yeah, that's right, of course. Yeah, we did video one hour podcast about it. But yeah, Claude Code is just amazing. It has changed the way we're working. And yeah, it's like the software development that I started doing like when I joined versus what I'm doing like today, it's completely different. I'm not even opening the same apps or working with the same tools.
- [30:00]
Dan Shipper
So yeah, that's great.
- [30:02]
Kieran
Yeah. And one really cool thing that we have going on between us that I really enjoy and like, I would encourage everyone else to do is like, I've run companies. I was VP of engineering of a few before as a co founder and I managed teams and I have that experience of like managing, doing code reviews and all of that. And it's becoming more important again, even as an ic, to have these skills and what we do, Natasha and I, we just go do a pair code review. Natash records everything I say. I just ramble about my philosophy, when to make a method longer or shorter. Like, and then Natasha like, oh, but why not here? And I'm like, oh yeah, good question. Like, that's a feel. But like this is the feeling. And Natash records all of that and then feeds it into an LLM and says, okay, can you create a cloth command for this that I can run, like key run review Every time I do a certain feature or when there's like a high risk feature, you want to like, you look at code a different way. But how do you know when it's a high risk feature? And like we try to distill all these thoughts from my head and from Natasha's head into like a rule set. Like, like an operation SOP style thing that we can then automate and try out. And that's really cool.
- [31:27]
Dan Shipper
We should totally put that on every. And make that available for people. Like, I want the Kieran coderview. And it's actually interesting because I think there's a, there's a common pattern here. Like what you're doing with code, I'm doing with writing.
- [31:41]
Kieran
Yeah, absolutely.
- [31:42]
Dan Shipper
In the, in the editorial organization, like every time I give feedback, we're starting to like record all the feedback on like the headlines and the intros and all that kind of stuff. And then another One of our. And we have a prompt that all of the writers now use that does the. Does that kind of editing or it does copy editing, which our. Our editor in chief, Kate, is usually spending a lot of time on. That nitesh also, like, automatically now runs in our code base whenever we're doing copies, so our editor doesn't have to look at it, which is amazing. And I'm also doing this with Danny, who runs Spiral, which is our short form content automation tool. And I've just been sitting with him every. Every day almost and talking about what good writing is. And he's recording all that and putting that into the tool so that it can write with my taste, basically. And I think that there's. You have a word for this, Kieran, that I think is. Actually, it's. It's. We're applying into engineering, but I think it applies more broadly, which is compounding engineering, which is instead of doing the work, you do the thing that. That does the work going forward. So instead of always, you know, doing a code review with Nitesh, you're recording that so that it compounds and now you have a slash command that Nitesh can use and it takes less time for each successive code review.
- [32:59]
Kieran
Agreed. Yes. Like, we don't want to repeat ourselves. Natash and I like joke because clearly these tools are not perfect. And sometimes AI slop comes out in the review and you're like, what is this mess? And we just need to jump in manually and do things. But that's the moment where we learn because we talk about why it is a mess and what is wrong to extract that and make it better next time. So as long as you learn and improve and don't make the same mistakes, you can use tools like this to never have to repeat yourself.
- [33:31]
Brandon
I feel like you guys embody like. So I spend a lot of time obviously with. With you all on the studio side, but also on consulting projects. So I'm seeing. I feel like I'm simultaneously seeing, like, what is the best version of this? In which case you're recording every conversation. There's like golden nuggets of information in every conversation. And you turn those into, like, rules, you turn it into like, operating procedures. So I see like the best version of this, which you guys do. And then I see the absolute worst version of this, where people spend so much time trying to identify every single issue, but then not doing the actual work and building the muscle of. Of actually doing it. They're just spending time trying to, like, write it all out and I feel like the thing that I've like, loved watching the two of you do is there's no, there's no like, end goal. This is just a journey that you're on and it's going to constantly be getting better and you're going to be constantly discovering new things. But the through line between all of it is it's actually conversation, conversation with the tools using, but also conversation with one another, recording all those conversations and then using the AI to pull out the important pieces in those conversations that you don't. It's hard sometimes to identify. I just spoke for an hour. What's the important thing that I just said? Like, there's only, only one important thing comes out of a conversation. That conversation was worth it as long as it's captured and put into, you know, cursor rules or whatever. You know, you're. Whatever tool you're using. So it's just been a pleasure to watch you guys do that.
- [35:12]
Kieran
Yeah. And like, basically this learning or this muscle applies to everything. It's also the prompts that generate the summaries. Like there is a loop like that the evaluations rerun to see if something is good or not. Like you can use all of these as feedback to improve the system, improve everything. And like, see, see what it does when a new model drops? Is the new model better? Is the cheaper model better? Like, it's very surprising because sometimes the cheaper model is also better. Like, we live in times like that, which is ridiculous. Yeah.
- [35:51]
Dan Shipper
Yeah. One of the things that I think is, is true about that too is like, the models just get cheaper on their own. So like, even if you don't do anything, like you're. It's like 10 times cheaper to run the same model in like three months. So we just get all these performance gains for free.
- [36:08]
Brandon
But don't try to solve problems that we think is going to be solved soon.
- [36:12]
Dan Shipper
It's going to be one shotted by the, by the model in three months. Yeah. But I think one of the special things to bring it back to core, I think one of the special things is like, we're gaing it today. It's coming out today for everyone. And as part of that process, I've gotten the opportunity to talk to a lot of users because we're trying to figure out, okay, like, how does it fit into people's lives? How does it, how do they, how do they talk about it? So that we can use that on the landing page or on the launch video or, and, and also, like, what value, what Value do they get out of it? Yeah. And, and so how do we price it? Which has been a big journey. We like released the initial version of standalone pricing to our beta group like 2 months ago and it was like a, everyone freaked out. Which is a big lesson learned is like you never, you never want to. They had been using it for free and we put a price on it and you never want to like take something away from people. Like obviously that is upsetting but we had not thought of that. But now we know and we're, you know now, now we have pricing which has been. Been difficult to figure out, but I'm pretty confident in it. But the thing I wanted to say is it's just very special. I've worked on a lot of products. I think we've all here worked on a lot of different products and it's very special and rare to work on something that is not even publicly available, that has a 10,000 person wait list and that has a thousand or more daily active users and getting to talk to them. People love this or at least the people that I'm talking to because I'm talking to the fans, but there are real fans that are. This has changed my life. Like it has completely transformed my relationship to email and there's something so satisfying about it and I feel so like proud to get to like be a small part of that. I wonder how you guys feel.
- [38:02]
Kieran
Yeah, it's, it's really nice. Like I've, I've worked on many products but this one especially like I've random people reach out, say I love Quora. I'm like, okay, great. Like that energy of like, like super fans or like really, really dedicated people. Even though in the beginning like it was kind of crap in places or there were bugs, they were like it was, wasn't smooth everywhere. Like now, now it is smooth but like people are, there are people that are using this for so long and giving great feedback and growing with us. So it's, it's really nice and I know that means that we're building something. There is something here. Like there is something important and yeah, it's the best thing. Like making people feel good or feel a certain way, using software, telling a story, it's like the most fun thing to do. So I love to work on this.
- [39:00]
Brandon
Yeah, I just like the fact that it's so opinionated and because of that people have come back and been like this has changed my life is very driving for me personally and I think it's because we all have the Same kind of, like, wants and desires, which is to, like, continue to do a great or this is one of them, to do a great job with our work, but be able to enjoy our lives to the fullest. And email is just like death by a thousand cuts. And I feel like we've really done a great job of like, freeing people from that. I feel freed from it. And I think that's why when people tell us they love the product, they like, are obsessed with it. And that's also why for some people, like, that's. It's not a good fit. It also has been like, you know, you. You do have to pay for it now you just have to like, subscribe to every. And when you know, this gets released, you'll be able to buy it standalone as well. And it's been really successful, you know. And, you know, we have thousands of users and they're actually already are paying for it too, which, like, I almost feel like we don't give ourselves enough credit for the fact that like, oh, there actually is value already. It's $20 a month total.
- [40:21]
Kieran
Yeah, we had like, I think 60 people sign up last week for the paid plan. And we're not even promoting. We're not live. Like, it's like a very hard way to even figure out where, where to. Where to click until we go live. Now I want to show one other way. So, like, we're at the start. This is really the start of the vision we have for where this can go. But there's another cool way is like, I don't know. For some reason it thinks that solar is very important to me. I can forward this to C at CORA Computer and say, this is promotion, yo. And. And this will. This will. This is another way to interact with the assistant. So you can just email the assistant. And I've seen other people use it very creatively. Like one other person, they have like investors that are added to a certain list and they created a zapier integration that if something got added to a list, they would forward that new email, say, hey, cora, can you add this new investor to this category? So it's kind of like an API integration. And I've seen Dan also like, get a, like a complex document and say, like, hey, like, summarize this for me. Or say. Or like, can you. Can you draft a response a certain way? Like there is an interaction, so. Oh, well then great. This is, this is an email that's older, so it's. It gives me that. But it will unsubscribe For. For this email or give options. And. And if you do this, you can you go into here. So, yeah. Okay. So. So, yeah, it will unsubscribe, it will do the same things, and you can continue the conversation in Quora. You can see we're still prepping for some last things for launch, but. Yeah.
- [42:31]
Dan Shipper
Cool. So we're almost out of time. I think. I want to just talk a little bit about the future. Like, where do we want to go with this? And one way to think about this is I'm curious, what's the next feature that everyone wants that you're like, oh, my God, it's going to be amazing when this happens. I have one in mind. Do you guys want to go around and say that your next feature. Kieran, maybe you start.
- [42:58]
Kieran
I want the iOS app.
- [43:00]
Dan Shipper
I want it on my phone. Yeah, that's a big deal.
- [43:03]
Kieran
So I secretly have, like an app on my phone called Quora, but it's not there.
- [43:12]
Dan Shipper
Yeah. Natasha, do you have one? Yeah.
- [43:17]
Natasha
I just want the assistant to be, like, so powerful that it replaces the AI systems for me, like. Cause it can already do that. I know that. So I'm waiting for that.
- [43:28]
Dan Shipper
Yeah. What about you, Brandon?
- [43:31]
Brandon
I think I'm just done with Gmail. Like, I want to start to. I want to be in Quora at all times. And I think that, like, we can do crazy things if we're responding from emails too. It's an amazing companion right now, but I want it to be the whole thing.
- [43:44]
Dan Shipper
Yeah, I agree with that. I also re. I agree with all of these. My other big one is I just want a true unified brief of all my inboxes because I have a couple of these inboxes where I'm just like, I get so many emails, but they're all basically not important. Except every once in a while there's an email that's like, you missed a credit card payment or whatever, and I'm like, oh, my God. And so, like, I really want.
- [44:09]
Brandon
You don't have auto pay set up.
- [44:10]
Dan Shipper
I do. It was a new credit. It was a new credit card. I thought. I set up auto pay and I.
- [44:14]
Kieran
Was like, oh, Cora down. Dan missed an email.
- [44:18]
Dan Shipper
Yeah. Yeah. So I just want. I want that unified brief instead of having to collect three different briefs. But I think this is a great roadmap. I'm psyched for the next six months.
- [44:30]
Kieran
Yeah. I want to add one more thing. I want to just make whatever we do with categorization and summarization, like, just the basics that we do. Now just, like, a hundred times better. Always keep improving that because we can, like, we're. We're really at the start, and there's so much potential to make him, like, way better.
- [44:49]
Dan Shipper
Yeah.
- [44:49]
Brandon
I feel like when I work with cora, I'm like, okay, I'm. I'm working with an assistant that I've worked with for, like, a year and a half and knows me really well, and I'm like, what would it be like if I worked with them for 10 years where they just know me better than anyone else and they have.
- [45:06]
Dan Shipper
A PhD in all of human knowledge and they have a PhD and access.
- [45:10]
Kieran
To my whole life?
- [45:11]
Dan Shipper
Yeah. Cool. Well, the sky's the limit. I'm psyched for this launch today. I'm psyched to get to work with all you guys. Thank you for joining and we'll see you next time.
- [45:23]
Natasha
Thank you so much.
- [45:25]
Kieran
Thank you. Go check it out. Cora computer.
- [45:29]
Dan Shipper
Cora, computer. Check it out.
- [45:38]
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