Thank you for your response. I think the ICP needs some refinement. I've found it pretty hard to prospect because it is so broad.
> People generally don't have problem with email scheduling
I think this stems from the fact that there is no existing tool that solves this problem. Clearly, tools like Calendly haven't solved it for execs or people with complex scheduling flows. A lot of it is caused by the fact that people tend to just tolerate scheduling because they don't know a better way, leading them to waste more time than they expect.
> The moment Persona is compared to a human EA, you lose on judgment, context, and trust.
I agree with this. I'm trying to steer away from this actually, because a lot of companies sell an AI EA, even though their product doesn't even do anything related to EA tasks.
I think the landing page needs more work, copy wise. I'm certainly moving towards the control thing. The features are in place, so I need to tweak our marketing.
> Accept that this may not be a standalone company
Totally. Scheduling alone cannot be a standalone company. That's just the first pain point I'm attacking. I have many more features that are in progress that move it more into it's own category. Think of it more as a email delegation layer for AI agents.
I agree with this framing a lot, especially the idea that judgment is the bottleneck
In my experience building Persona, an AI scheduling assistant, the most useful role for humans isn't to be always in the loop. LLM's are terrible at making judgement calls, especially when the right choice depends on a specific user's priorities and the confidence is low. However, even with low confidence, the llm still needs to make a guess.
I think an interesting use case for this would be to have llm's be able to ask questions to users when they hit a specific level of uncertainty. These could be directly answered by a human, or inferred as the user uses the product more.
That feels more scalable than completely blocking human-in-the-loop queues and more honest than pretending the model already knows the user’s preferences.
Historical tracking is useful, but only if it’s dead simple. If it requires standing up a DB or service, I probably won’t use it.
I've been trying to track down cloud waste recently after realizing EC2 was storing 10GB snapshots every 12 hours for the past 8 months and I didn't realize. Obviously not a crazy 20k bill, but still annoying -- especially at small scale.
Thanks! Actually I already built Option 1 (JSON files + compare command), just haven't published it yet. Will be in the next release.
But your comment made me think about Option 2 more - exporting metrics to existing monitoring stacks, OTel/Prometheus. For teams already using them, that might actually be "dead simple" since there's no new tool setup or learn.
I'm not sure how AWS logs work since I'm just used to looking at Cost Explorer... But I would assume they actually store the history themselves, and you can just pull it.
While this may be true for casual users, for dev native products like Codex, the desktop experience actually matters a lot. When you are living in the tool for hours, latency, keyboard handling, file system access, and OS-level integration stop being “nice to have” and start affecting real productivity. web or Electron apps are fine for experimentation, but they hit a ceiling fast for serious workflows -- especially if the icp is mostly technical users
And they're pretty much the only example of an embedded browser architecture actually performing tolerably and integrating well with the native environment.
Fair, I think I'm certainly in the minority. Especially now more then ever with an increasing amount of non-technical people exploring vibe coding, 'good enough' really is good enough for most users
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I really like that quote -- hopefully I start another company and think about distribution straight off the bat. Can I ask what the product was? Even just a general idea. And, how did you find the emails.
I've found myself procrastinating a lot when it comes to trying to acquire users. It's a lot more fun to build features than it is to do cold outreach. Yes, you found the site :).
1) Understandable, let me reply to the other 3 points to see if pricing makes sense after that.
2) We’re not trying to replace Calendly. Calendly is great for link-based 1:1 scheduling, but many execs still operate primarily over email and actively avoid sending links. Persona is an email delegation layer that handles inbound scheduling end-to-end: proactive follow-ups, coordinating across long threads, and dynamically rescheduling when higher-priority contacts come in. That distinction should definitely be clearer on the landing page.
3) Fair point that you’re not the audience. We’re focused on founders and execs who spend a meaningful amount of time coordinating meetings over email. For them, the pain isn’t finding a time once, it’s the constant back-and-forth, follow-ups, and reshuffling priorities. Not everyone can afford a human EA, and link-based scheduling tools can’t handle that level of personalization (talking to an investor is very different than a friend). Research we’ve seen shows execs still spend 6+ hours per week on scheduling.
4) That’s a good point, and we’re thinking along similar lines. Since Persona operates directly over email, there’s a natural distribution loop there, similar to Calendly links, and we plan to lean into that more deliberately. Would you be bothered if you were on our 23/mo plan and still had a banner there? Also, do you think there should be a free tier beyond the 14 day trial?
Software for teachers. Teachers tend to talk to each other, which is great for distribution. On the other hand, they have very little spending power. But back on the other hand again, they don't get as many cold emails as execs do.
> Research we’ve seen shows execs still spend 6+ hours per week on scheduling.
Be very careful not to delude yourself here. No one is spending 6+ hours a week on scheduling who is willing to use your tool. That's almost a full workday. If you are at this point, you probably have a human assistant who handles this.
> Would you be bothered if you were on our 23/mo plan and still had a banner there?
Probably not. But if i were, i'd probably just upgrade to a higher plan.
Interesting! I bet now with AI, you can create an agent to do this. I'm glad that worked, however, we're targeting founders of b2b saas companies who are early stage, and that is quite a broad search.
The “lump of cognition” framing misses something important. it’s not about how much thinking we do, but which thinking we stop doing. A lot of judgment, ownership, and intuition comes from boring or repetitive work, and outsourcing that isn’t free. Lowering the cost of producing words clearly isn’t the same as increasing the amount of actual thought.
I'm grateful that I spent a significant part of my life forced to solve problems and forced to struggle to produce the right words. In hindsight I know that that's where all the learning was. If I'd had a shortcut machine when I was young I'd have used it all the time, learned much less, and grown up dependent on it.
I'd argue that choosing words is a key skill because language is one of our tools for examining ideas and linking together parts of our brains in new ways.
Even just writing notes you'll never refer to again, you're making yourself codify vaguer ideas or impressions, test assumptions, and then compress the concept for later. It's an new external information channel between different regions of your head which seems to provide value.
Looking at the words that get produced at this lowered cost, and observing how satisfactory they apparently are to most people (and observing the simplicity of the heuristics people use to try to root out "cheap" words), has been quite instructive (and depressing).
Totally. Here is what my emails typically look like:
Re: quick scheduling question
Hi [name],
I’ve followed [company] for a while and the scale you’re operating at is impressive. With customer and partner meetings, plus internal meetings, I imagine your calendar gets pretty full.
I’m working on a way for founders to cut down the email back-and-forth of scheduling without hiring or managing an EA.
Is scheduling something you still handle personally at all?
I think your second sentence is the strongest -- it's specific about what you actually help with.
Right now, the title and preview text on mobile probably look like "Quick scheduling question" / "Hi [name], I've followed [company] for...". This looks like a lot of other emails in my inbox that are requesting a meeting time. So I think a lot of people who quickly scan their inbox would pass this by and not even open the full email.
I'd also drop the "re: " part unless it's genuinely a reply. It breaks trust.
Got it. That's fair, I could definitely remove the first sentence. However, I still want the email to seem personal. Do you think it is important to have that personalized part somewhere in the email?
There's no re, I just put that there instead of saying Subject:. Sorry, that's confusing.
I feel this is the wrong business direction. If you do it well, at most you'll only save on the salary of an administrative assistant, but they actually want much more, and this small improvement won't attract their attention.
I get the concern if the value is framed as “replacing an admin assistant”, but for many founders, the real win isn’t salary savings, it’s eliminating context switching, follow-ups, and mental overhead around coordination. As well as eliminating the mistakes that can be made by humans. Even small logistics can disproportionately drain attention. If done well, this is less about cost reduction and more about reclaiming focus and execution speed.
> People generally don't have problem with email scheduling I think this stems from the fact that there is no existing tool that solves this problem. Clearly, tools like Calendly haven't solved it for execs or people with complex scheduling flows. A lot of it is caused by the fact that people tend to just tolerate scheduling because they don't know a better way, leading them to waste more time than they expect.
> The moment Persona is compared to a human EA, you lose on judgment, context, and trust. I agree with this. I'm trying to steer away from this actually, because a lot of companies sell an AI EA, even though their product doesn't even do anything related to EA tasks.
I think the landing page needs more work, copy wise. I'm certainly moving towards the control thing. The features are in place, so I need to tweak our marketing.
> Accept that this may not be a standalone company Totally. Scheduling alone cannot be a standalone company. That's just the first pain point I'm attacking. I have many more features that are in progress that move it more into it's own category. Think of it more as a email delegation layer for AI agents.
Thanks again for your thoughtful response.