All information that follows is confidential, please do not share, copy, forward, relay, quote, etc.

<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/50c21ac1-a0c1-4130-856c-37463cc771e6/sjfhksjkfhs.png" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/50c21ac1-a0c1-4130-856c-37463cc771e6/sjfhksjkfhs.png" width="40px" /> Micro is an AI-powered all-in-one tool for CRM, project management, email and more that helps entrepreneurs manage their businesses with simplicity and delight.

Micro organizes data from email and other business tools into interactive “Micro Apps” for every workflow, from fundraising to task management, embedded in a modern email client experience.

Our initial product is a light-weight CRM that automatically enriches and updates records using AI and dozens of datapoints specific to our wedge use cases (fundraising, sales, & hiring).

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<aside> ℹ️ Status: Pre-revenue. We’ve got a small cohort of alpha testers today and adding more every week.

Team: Brett Goldstein was cofounder/CEO of Launch House, lead product teams at Google and Clearbit, and studied language models at Berkeley. Early team members include Naveen, Sebastian Crossa and Justin Pagano, former founders and a life-long technical leaders.

Investors: a16z, Flybridge, Graph, Day One, Michael Ovitz, Balaji Srinivasan, and 50+ early-stage startup founders.

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<aside> 💡 The Key Insight™

Email was designed for async messaging & task mgmt (kinda) - The most popular clients today use 50-year-old designs for email as async long-form messaging. The most modern improvements on this UX treat ALL email as tasks.

But people use email for a lot of things today - From tracking package deliveries to managing sales funnels, email is used for an extremely wide range of workflows both for professionals and consumers. You could describe it as a “weak super app” because these workflows don’t have their own UX like workflows/apps in WeChat do.

This is hurting productivity and mental health - Email overload and communication breakdowns (caused by jamming these workflows into the same under-optimized UX) are driving inefficiencies in business and incredible psychological stress for the billions of email users.

We can use LLMs to create custom UI for any workflow within email - This breakthrough in AI allows us to identify specific types of emails, extract the most relevant data from them and render that data in a more intuitive Micro Applications for a given workflow, thus making email into a “strong super app”. Over time, Micro becomes “Amazon Basics for SaaS”

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<aside> 🗺️ The Master Plan™

  1. Create an amazing product for early stage founders built on top of email - a CRM that is especially killer for fundraising [We are here]
  2. Expand to become the leading light weight CRM and project management tool serving early stage founders and their teams
  3. Build out email, project management, and document management to feature parity and other key integrations to become the super-app for any professional.
  4. Leverage cheaper and better AI models when they’re available to unlock user generated Micro Apps, AI email filters, etc and make these available in a marketplace
  5. Integrate 1st and 3rd party AI agents to communicate and execute actions on users behalf </aside>

<aside> 🔥

Test Micro 720p.mp4

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Foreword

Things have gotten really out of hand.

The end of zero-interest rates also marked the end of an era of exuberant hiring. Companies are getting smaller and individuals (especially entrepreneurs) are now responsible for more work than ever before - more SaaS tools, more information, just more. Coupled with the historic rise of attention deficit disorders, the global workforce is headed for a reckoning.

Email seems to be at the center of this mess.

Since it’s invention nearly 50 years ago, email has evolved into a kind of cross-platform super app that people use to run their entire lives and businesses out of. 1 BILLION professionals spend 3 hours a day in email. What started as a simple communications platform has become a sad representation of the cacophony of modern work - from a “fashionable annoyance” to an existential problem for human well being and global progress.

What’s more is that the Silicon Valley productivity bro narrative that Inbox 0 is not only attainable but required to be considered competent - that has dictated the way we’ve built software for the world over the last 20 years - has become increasingly out of touch with how the world actually is.

Simply put, humans are not designed to work like this.

*“This mismatch between how we’re wired to communicate and how we’re coerced into communicating by modern technology creates a deeply human sense of frustration.”

- Cal Newport, A World Without Email*

Despite billions of dollars invested by big tech companies, research institutions, and startups, we haven't made significant strides. New vertical SaaS tools come out every day and the innovations we've seen in the email space have been mere iterations - faster horses, so to speak - on a user experience that still falls short of meeting our human needs.

This is what half a century if innovation in email user experience looks like. Left is a depiction of email clients from the earliest years of email. Right is a modern email client used today with nearly the same UI.

This is what half a century if innovation in email user experience looks like. Left is a depiction of email clients from the earliest years of email. Right is a modern email client used today with nearly the same UI.

Now with the emergence of large language models, a new world of possibilities has opened up. Like paradigm shifts before, many will be tempted to build skeuomorphically injecting AI into existing products, but the biggest winners with the largest impact on the world will build natively, AI-first. That’s our plan.