Focus, Ship, and Expand

June 01, 2024

I founded Quill with Nick Adams 8 months ago, and in the meantime, I’ve spent most of my time building and working directly with customers, not having much time for socializing. I enjoy that (a lot!), but it’s time to come back up and engage again, so this month I’m challenging myself to write online more.

Writing for others doesn’t come naturally to me because anytime I start to write I feel like I’m cutting off possibilities. But I’m trying to keep in mind a lesson that I’ve learned over and over from shipping products - Narrow focus to ship fast

The great thing about narrowing your focus is that it doesn’t actually cut down on the size of the future you can build, it just gives you a hook into that large future from which you can start serving customers and learning. Shipping to customers is the crucible in which you can learn which of the many ways you could build are the most important and provides instant clarity.

Early on, Nick and I started by building a local desktop AI assistant called Exec - it could read & send iMessages/SMS, emails, WhatsApp messages and more. We built a plugin architecture so future developers could hook into it and build their own apps. We started with a CRM, scheduling with people, and summarizing long group discussions.

But for all that it did right, it didn’t meet the threshold to create a habit. Directly using iMessage was often faster and we need we needed to become users’ primary way of sending messages if we were ever going to become a habit - which meant it needed to do at least 95% of everything you use a message client for. That’s too broad for an MVP.

But when we built the first few features that became Quill (private local transcription + really good templates for writing after a meeting), that immediately became our preferred workflow for any discussion we had. It was much more narrow than Exec, but we had our hook.

Now, 8 months later, we’ve made Quill much better, more dependable, added our iPhone app, expanded features, etc. and we are just getting started. Our users spend hours with Quill every day and it makes them better versions of themselves.

The vision is expanding back out again to post-meeting productivity and a world in which people have creative, high-bandwidth, engaging conversations with each other, the sort of conversations that leave you energized and feeling more human afterward – and Quill helps you follow-up and execute on your grand ideas.

This is an expansive vision that we can spend years building, but only by narrowing our original product did we have a hook to start from.