Transcript: ‘How We Built Our AI Email Assistant: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Cora’

The transcript of AI & I with Kieran Klaassen, Brandon Gell, and Nityesh Agarwal is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

1. Introduction: 00:01:40
2. Three ways Cora transforms your inbox (and your day): 00:04:21
3. A live walkthrough of Cora’s features: 00:05:09
4. The inside story of the first time Kieran, Brandon, and Dan used Cora: 00:12:13
5. Train Cora like you would a trusted chief of staff: 00:16:30
6. The AI tools that blew our minds while building Cora: 00:27:25
7. How we build workflows that compound with AI at Every: 00:30:34
8. The dream features that we’d like to put on Cora’s roadmap: 00:42:36

Transcript

(00:00:00)

Dan Shipper

Welcome to the show everybody.

Brandon Gell

Thanks, Dan.

Kieran Klaassen

Thank you. Good to be here.

Nityesh Agarwal

Thanks for having us.

Dan Shipper

So today is a really big day. We are officially GA-ing Cora. Cora is the AI assistant. Cora is the AI email assistant that we've been building for the last year. It’s been in beta for the last six months. It had 10,000 people on the waitlist. Now it has over 1,000 daily active users, which is incredible. It’s 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 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. So let's go around and everyone introduces themselves. Brandon, do you want to start?

Brandon Gell

Yes, I'm Brandon. I run the studio here at Every and I help run the consultancy. Kieran?

Kieran Klaassen

I’m Kieran. I am the GA. I'm building Cora. I'm writing the code. I started writing all the code by myself doing support, features, everything, and then got Nityesh 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 Nityesh joined.

Nityesh Agarwal

Yeah. And I'm Nityesh and I'm the engineer on Cora helping Kieran. I'm the newest member of the team. I'm having fun helping Kieran code very cool stuff in Cora.

Kieran Klaassen

Basically we're just jamming on like, how can we use AI the best way to build Cora, which is really, really cool.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. Basically for anyone who's been following along with the podcast, they actually don't build anything. They just tell Claude to build stuff now. So if you're interested in how Cora's gotten built—all the details—definitely go check out an episode we published three three weeks ago on Cloud Code. But yeah, I want to start with showing people the product because I think that's the best way 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 Cora is, is it sort of like having a chief of staff in your inbox for $15 a month instead of $150,000 a year. And the thing that it does for me is I just have that kind of feeling where I'm just like someone is taking care of my emails so that I don't have to think about it and I can focus on stuff that actually matters to me. And Cora does three things. One is it screens your emails so it decides what needs to be in your inbox and what you don't actually need to see—so anything urgent, anything you need to reply to from a human gets to your inbox. 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 writing style and previous emails you responded to, and try to draft a reply for you. So it saves time that way. And then twice a day, it sends you a brief summary of 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 talk about what we're looking at?

Kieran Klaassen

Yeah. So there are two things here. This is the product, Cora, but obviously you have your inbox as well. This is my inbox. Normally before Cora, I was not an inbox zero person. I had just thousands of emails here in my inbox and 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 it. So and this is funny, I was invited to core 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.

Dan Shipper

Can you show us what that brief email looks like?

Kieran Klaassen

What I do is I can open my brief within Gmail and it will give me a number, 84 percent 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. You don't need to go into Cora, but you can. And if you click into Cora, you go here and you can dive deeper.

Dan Shipper

And so for people who are listening, he clicked into Cora and what you see is this really beautiful oil painting of a sky background. 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, talk about each section.

Kieran Klaassen

Let me see if there's anything here. So yeah, I jumped to Wednesday afternoon briefly. You can see the background change as well in the afternoon. And the most important stuff is on the top, it's called important info. It means you should know about it, but it doesn't mean you have to take action. Anything that needs your immediate attention or action will stay in your inbox that is time sensitive. But everything that's important to know like for example Chase said something to me. So everything important is here. This is the one you always want to look at and everything else is kind of will get the most important stuff for you summarized, 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, where did the money flow? Who did you pay? Did you receive money? And you can see here also this is in English, this is in Dutch. So 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 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 and open this email or newsletter and read it here. Or I can jump to Gmail and read it from there.

Dan Shipper

One of the really cool things about this, at least for me, is obviously 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. 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, different kind of writing task where you're not writing a specific piece, you're writing like many pieces. 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 comes into how we summarize your emails for you, so you're getting the best summary possible of what's in your inbox.

Brandon Gell

I think the other thing that I really like about what we did with Cora was it's kind of like this extremely opinionated way of using email, starting from a place all of us hate email. We don't want to be doing email. It wasn't like we were like, let's make an assistant it wasn't it didn't start there. It was just like the very first principle. How do I want to interact with this thing that is an 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.

Dan Shipper

Traditionally email is a to-do list written by everyone but yourself.

Brandon Gell

Yes. And so I feel like just over the past year, 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 grown into this fully fledged product that is 100 percent opinionated, which is why when we have people use it, 80 percent of people that use it, they absolutely love it and it literally changes their relationship to email, which is how I would describe my experience with it. And then there's another 20 percent that absolutely hate it. We're totally okay with that because it's so opinionated and you're just not a good fit. But that's made an amazing, sticky product for that.

(00:10:00)

Dan Shipper

Yeah. I think the thing that it reveals is how much we have this anxious attachment to our email inboxes. 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 a lie. And my life is way better when I'm not, because I know Cora is handling it for me. And I know Kieran, you have this story of like the first time that we realized this, the first time we tried having Cora handle our emails. Do you want to, do you want to tell that story?

Kieran Klaassen

Yeah, absolutely. We started Cora 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.

Brandon Gell

And that was really important because we realized, wait, only like 10 percent of emails that we all receive, we actually need to write responses to, which means the bigger problem is this other 90 percent that you need to sift through. That was a huge unlock.

Kieran Klaassen

Yeah. 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—you get a brief once a day or twice a day and we were offsite in Nice in France and. I was like, let me just build this. This wasn't the Cursor Composer times. So it was very ancient AI times. But Cursor Composer helped me create a very rude version of basically scanning an email, seeing 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. It’s not too hard to do that because the first version was easy and I enabled it for my own account. I was like, then are you sure you want to enable this on your account? Because, it will go hard. It will archive maybe a lot of things. And Dan was like yeah, I understand. And Brandon said, I want to go. And then Brandon jumped in and Dan was still 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 all there and. The day after, we didn't really understand what was going to happen, but the day after we were in the East, we were sitting at a cafe drinking wine like you do in France. And we were checking our inboxes on our phone on the Gmail app, and we were like, holy shit. there. It feels cleaner. We still had that urge to check and to refresh and to refresh, but there was nothing. It was just cleaner. It was quiet.

Brandon Gell

I remember getting my first brief and thinking, this is so shitty. It needs so much more work, but it's so much better. Then what my life was like before. And for me personally, I feel like I've been on this crusade of trying to deny this previous version of myself where I'm like super on top of my email and like I'm trying to create these new habits where like doing great work is important vs. just like doing fake work of like constantly maintaining inbox zero. And this was the first time where I was like, oh, doing that on my own is impossible, but Cora 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. It was a lifestyle change, not just like a product change.

Kieran Klaassen

It felt emotional. We felt chill, 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.

Brandon Gell

I have a direction that we could go, which is we, so we did this and then we invested in making it prettier and refining the summaries and building all this functionality. And it was a really smooth experience. But we all had one problem and a lot of our customers had one problem, which is it knows me, but it doesn't know me super well. And sometimes—

Kieran Klaassen

Just the context, the context thing and the anxiety.

Brandon Gell

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 really, really deep on that. So we decided to build an assistant, which is a tool that now lives inside of Cora and we decided to go really hard at customizing your experience during onboarding. We have a beautiful onboarding that people now get to experience, but maybe Kieran, you can talk a little bit about what the assistant does. Maybe we can even show it. And then I think this is a pretty unique product that exists. Maybe you can talk about how the two of you went about building it.

Dan Shipper

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, I can just email it and it will reply. And so, 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. 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 can also do is it's an AI in your inbox. So for example, if I get a big, long email from a lawyer, I just forward it to Cora, and I'm like, can you summarize this for me? And I get something in line that tells me what, what the lawyer is trying to say. It's really good. and it even forms memories and it keeps track of who you are. So it's pretty powerful. So take it away, Kieran. I'd love to maybe show the assistant.

Kieran Klaassen

We built everything, we built a brief, we built a drafting, but we really realized the power lies with really understanding who you are because people loved it. but comments mostly were like I needed to do something very specific to me and having software be very generalized. Opinionated is good, but there should also be 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. It’s just me. And not everyone has kids. Some people have investors that they talk to a lot. I have kids. I mean, they want a lot of attention. So everyone wants to personalize things within the realm of our opinion of like, this is how it should be, and we realize that. Actually, all of that context is already there. It's in your email. 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 Cora 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 a simple interaction could be, for example here, this is about Claude Code’s new features, it's categorizing other, and other is a little bit weird category where like it doesn't really understand where it should be, but I think it's important, so make it important info.

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 Cora Assistant on the right side. And basically in the Cora Assistant, it's like, hey, I see you want to talk about this email. What do you want me to do with it? And Kieran said like, make an important, categorize it as important. 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 gonna go to the right place.

Brandon Gell

He also equally could have just said, this is an important email for me. And it would know. Cool. That means it needs to be, it 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?

Dan Shipper

And then you could respond and say, and it in fact did do that. It did. Asked him. If he wants to return this email.

(00:20:00)

Kieran Klaassen

Do you want to return this to my inbox? Because sometimes it is, hey, this is very important. 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. go way further with this. But this is a very easy way to interact.

Brandon Gell

Yeah, one of my personal favorite use cases is, my work changes over time, what I'm focusing on. And just the other day, I realized that like, pretty consistently Cora 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 Cora, it's from this domain, it's from this email address. And I literally was just like, hey, people who are cold emailing specifically about Every product studio and want to be EIRs, I want to see those emails right away. And it was like a vibe-based rule for me. So it's really, the assistant is really dynamic and it allows you to fully customize what your experience is. And you do it now, you do it. Or rather by the time we launch this podcast you do that during onboarding. so right out the gate, it's this really personalized experience, which. I feel like it was a huge learning lesson for us.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. One of the things I think I would love to hear Kieran and Nityesh, I'd love to hear you guys talk about is this kind of categorization sounds simple. 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 Coral can do is actually a lot different from what a Gmail or a Superhuman can do with splits where. it can be sort of like rule based, 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 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 glance at the email. Do you guys want to talk about that?

Kieran Klaassen

Yes. What I hear sometimes is, 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 there it started. So it is really hard. There are many moving parts, there are many kinds of systems working at play. We have traditional algorithms that are 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. It's like, okay, great. How do I even know this works? Like, yes, when we were using it was great. 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 even 10 people per day complain about something wrong that I manually go in and fix it. So it is about building a system that works where people can give feedback that learns, that understands who you are, what you find important, and listens to signals that you do. 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, we were on target to burn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just in LLM costs, and then the brand was like pinging me in private, 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. Let me spend a day, let me do, do some work. Let me analyze things. And like, that's part of building LLM apps. You run against all these and then you have. LLM uses limits. you can certain models have limits and we were just using so many tokens that Anthropic at some point just said, nope. You're like, you're over the 400,000 tokens per minute every day I would get that. and you're like, oh, we're not, we didn't even start. So then you start increasing limits, moving things around, reducing, there are so many things going on here that seems very easy on a one-to-one skill, but if you skill two thousands of users suddenly becomes very different. And there are many things like we do embeddings, we do like pulling in similar emails. We have many strategies that work together to hopefully make the best decision and evaluate that as we go.

Brandon Gell

My favorite way that this has presented itself recently is in this little debate that you got on 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 backend 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 in three words, but what's actually happening in the backend is so complex and it's also indicative of what you and Nityesh do to build this. I feel like you guys are 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 are, you're not just launching new features for Cora, but new ways of building those features or reviewing those features. I mean, there's so many of them, but I wonder if, maybe Nityesh, we haven't heard from you. Is there like a single thing, that single tool that you and Kieran are using that really blew your mind in terms of the capabilities of building with AI?

Nityesh Agarwal

Yeah, definitely. There were like two instances I would say. So both of those were 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 with 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 when I'm speaking, I can give so much more context. So that was the first.

Dan Shipper

Let me just jump in there. I think that's just for people who are listening that don't have context. So 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, Nityesh, I think what you're saying is. talking to your code base was a thing that you maybe like hadn't considered doing, but herein literally his hands don't even touch the keyboard. and so that's been a game changer for you. What does that, what is that like, why is that so much better?

Nityesh Agarwal

It's just better because when you're typing, I can type really fast, I can type and I get all of those things and I've been typing like my whole life. But when you're typing, you get lazier and with these LLMs context is the king. So with speech I can tramble on for a minute or two and um every time when I ramble, it just gives me a better output. That is fundamentally a better way to work with LLMs, whether it comes to code or anything else. So that was the first time. It blew my mind.

Dan Shipper

Sweet. And then the second one, I assume, is Claude Code.

Nityesh Agarwal

Yeah, that's right, of course. We did put it out when our podcast about it, but yeah, Claude Code is amazing. It has changed the way we're working. And yeah, it's like the software development that I started doing, when I joined vs. what I'm doing like today, it's completely different. I'm not even opening the same apps or working with the same tools.

(00:30:00)

Kieran Klaassen

Yeah. And one, 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 have, I've run companies. I was VP for engineering a few before as a co-founder and I manage teams and I have that experience of 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, Nityesh and I, we just go do a pair code review. Nityesh records everything I say. I just ramble about my philosophy when to make a method longer, shorter and then Nityesh like, oh, but why not here? And I'm like, oh yeah, good question. that's a feeling, but this is the feeling. And Nityesh records all of that and then feeds it into an LLM and says, okay, can you. Create a Claude command for this that I can run, key run review every time I do a certain feature or when there's like a high risk feature you want to, you look at codes 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 Nityesh's head into a ruleset like. An operation, SOP-style thing that we can then automate and try out. And that's really cool.

Dan Shipper

We should totally put that on Every and make that available for people. I want the Kieran code review. And it's actually interesting because I think there's a common pattern here, what you're doing with code I'm doing with writing. In the editorial organization, like every time I give feedback, we're starting to record all the feedback 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 does copy editing, which our editor in chief, Kate, is usually spending a lot of time on that Nityesh also automatically now runs in our code base whenever we're doing copy, 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 of that and putting that into the tool so that it can write with my taste basically. And you have a word for this, Kieran, that I think is actually it's, we're applying it to engineering, but I think it applies more broadly, which is compounding engineering, which is instead of doing the work you do the thing that does the work going forward. So instead of always doing a code review with net neth you're recording that so that it compounds and now you have a slash command that Neth can use and it takes less time for each successive code review.

Kieran Klaassen

Yes, agreed. We don't want to repeat ourselves. We like we—Nityesh and I—like jokes because clearly these tools are not perfect. And sometimes AI slob comes out in a 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.

Brandon Gell

I feel like you guys embody so I spend a lot of time obviously with you all on the studio side, but also on consulting projects. So I'm seeing, I feel like I'm simultaneously seeing what is the best version. This, in which case you're recording every conversation, there's like golden nuggets of information in every conversation, and you turn those into rules, you turn it into operating procedures. So I see 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 actually doing it. They're just spending time trying to write it all out. And I feel like the thing that I've loved watching the two of you do is there's no end goal. This is just a journey that you're on and it's going to constantly be getting better and you're gonna be constantly discovering new things. But the through line between all of it is, it's actually conversation. Conversation with the tools you're 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 it's hard sometimes to identify, I just spoke for an hour, what's the important thing that I just said? There's only one important thing that comes out of a conversation. That conversation was worth it as long as it's captured and put into cursor rules or whatever your, whatever tool you're using. so it's just been a pleasure to watch you guys do that.

Kieran Klaassen

Yeah. And basically this learning or this muscle applies to everything. It's also the prompts that generate the summaries. There is a loop like the evaluations rerun to see if something is good or not. you can use all of these as feedback to improve the system, improve everything and see what it does when a new model drops. Is the new model better? Is the cheaper model better? It's very surprising because sometimes the cheaper model is also better. We live in times like that, which is ridiculous.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. One of the things that I think is true about that too is the models just get cheaper on their own. So, even if you don't do anything, you're, it's 10 times cheaper to run the same model in like three months. So we just get all these performance gains for free. But yeah, we also don't try to solve problems that we think are going to be solved soon. It's gonna be one-shotted by the model in three months. but I think one of the special things is to bring it back to Cora, I think one of the special things is we're GA-ing 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, how does it fit into people's lives? How did they talk about it so that we can use that on the landing page or on the launch video or also, what’s the value? What value do they get out of it? Yeah. and so how do we price it, which has been a big journey. We released the initial version of standalone pricing to our beta group like two months ago, and everyone freaked out, which is a big lesson learned if you never. You never want to, they have been using it for free and we put a price on it, and you never want to take something away from people. Obviously that is upsetting, but we had not thought of that, but now we know. and we're now, now we have pricing, which has been difficult to figure out. But I'm pretty confident in it. but the thing I wanted to say is that it's just very special. I've worked on a lot of products. I think we've all 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 like, this has changed my life. it has completely transformed my relationship to email and there's something so satisfying about it, and I feel so proud to get to be a small part of that. I wonder how you guys feel.

Kieran Klaassen

Yeah, it's really nice. I've worked on many products, but this one especially like I've random people reach out, say, I love Cora. I'm like, okay, great. that energy of super fans or really, really dedicated people, even though in the beginning like it was kind of crap in places or there were bugs, there were like, it wasn't smooth everywhere. Now it is smooth, but people are, there are people that are using this for so long and giving great feedback and growing with us. So it's really nice and. I know that means that we're building something. There is something here, there is something important and the best thing, making people feel good or feel a certain way using software, telling a story. It’s the most fun thing to do. So I love to work on this.

Brandon Gell

I've loved it. 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 wants and desires, which is to continue 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. I feel like we've really done a great job of freeing people from that. I feel freed from it, and I think that's why when people tell us they love the product they are obsessed with it. And that's also why for some people like that, it's not a good fit. Also you do have to pay for it now. You just have to subscribe to every and when, this gets released, you'll be able to buy it standalone as well. And it's been really successful and we have thousands of users and they're actually already paying for it too, which I almost feel we don't give ourselves enough credit for the fact that there actually is value already. It's $20 a month. Totally.

(00:40:00)

Kieran Klaassen

We had, 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 a very hard way to even figure out where to click until we go live now. I want to show one other way. So, 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. I don't know, for some reason it thinks that solar is very important to me. I can forward this to Cora.computer. And say, this is a promotion. And 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. One other person they have 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 since it is this. And I've seen Dan also get a complex document and say like, hey, summarize this for me or can you draft a response a certain way? There is an interaction. So oh, well then great. This is, this is an email that's older, so it gives me that, but it will unsubscribe for this email or give options. And if you can. So yeah, it will unsubscribe, it will do the same things and you can continue the conversation in Cora. You can see we're still prepping for some last things for launch.

Dan Shipper

Cool. So we're almost out of time. I think I want to just talk a little bit about the future. Where do we want to go with this? And one way to, 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 gonna be amazing when this happens. I have one in mind. Do you guys want to go around and say that your next feature is Kieran, maybe you start.

Kieran Klaassen

I want the iOS app, I want it on my phone. So I secretly have an app on my phone called Cora, but it's not there.

Dan Shipper

Nityesh, do you have one?

Nityesh Agarwal

Yeah, I just want the assistant to be like, so powerful that it replaces the AI systems for me. I know that. So I'm just waiting for that.

Brandon Gell

I think I'm just done with Gmail. I just want to start, I want to be in Cora at all times and I think that we can do crazy things if we're responding to emails too. It's an amazing companion right now. But I want it to be the whole thing.

Dan Shipper

I agree with that. I also 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 like, 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 I want that unified brief instead of having to click through different briefs. But I think this is a great roadmap. I'm psyched for the next six months.

Kieran Klaassen

I want to add one more thing. I want to just make whatever we do with categorization and summarization, just the basics that we do now, just 100 times better. Always keep improving that because we can, we're really at the start and there's so much potential to make him like way better.

Brandon Gell

I feel like, when I work with Cora, I'm like, okay, 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?

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.

Kieran Klassen

Go check it out. Thank you so much. Cora.computer. Check it out.

Thanks to Scott Nover for editorial support.

Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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