🎧 An Inside Look at Building an Email Client in Three Months

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper goes in depth with Kieran Klaassen, the general manager of Cora—our latest product incubation that lets you manage your inbox with AI—and Brandon Gell, Every’s head of Studio and consulting. We get into the inside story of how a one-person engineering team built and launched Cora in three months. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

On a summer evening last year, Every entrepreneur in residence Kieran Klaassen hotfooted it home from his coworking space. To passersby, Kieran may have looked a little…weird. For one, he appeared to be talking to himself. He walked in short, fast bursts, stopping to think for a moment, before resuming the janky monologue. Those within earshot would’ve heard snatches of “email,” “dread,” “Cora,” “delightful,” and “magic.” Oh, and there was a giant grin on his face the whole time.

Before leaving the office, Kieran had a call with Every Studio head Brandon Gell about a new project—reimagining email in the age of generative AI—and his mind was buzzing. After putting his daughters to bed that night, he sat down at his desk, pulled up a transcript of the voice memo he’d just recorded, and started coding.

When Brandon and Dan Shipper woke up the next morning, they had a message from Kieran: the MVP of Cora—a whole new way to do email—was ready.

That was the beginning of the exciting, exhausting, emotional journey of building a product we’re proud of at Every, and Dan invited Kieran and Brandon on the show to talk about it. They go behind the scenes on how they went from idea to execution on Cora—meandering, occasionally chaotic, and unvarnished (we have the voice memos to prove it). Here's a link to the episode transcript.

Cora, Every’s latest product incubation, is a way to manage your email with AI. It frees you from your inbox by turning all your emails into a sleek, scannable story—a “brief”—twice a day. A month after launch, there are almost 8,000 people on the waitlist. If you want to try Cora, sign up. The team is onboarding new people every day and prioritizing Every paid subscribers. If you want to jump the waitlist, make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already:

Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

If you want a quick summary, here’s a taste for paying subscribers:

Act I: Finding the right problem to solve

The team intuitively thought that the problem with email was the burden of responding, so they built Cora, an AI email assistant that drafted email in your voice and style. That was the primary function of the MVP that Kieran shipped overnight. Cora was tested internally until the product was really good at drafting email in the user’s voice, but they still weren’t satisfied—the drafts often missed important details.

“[W]e realized that it doesn't matter how good an LLM can mimic your voice,” Brandon recalls. “If it's not in your brain, if it doesn't have the context that you have, it just can't write a good email for you.”

At this point the team had been thinking deeply about email for a while—in Kieran’s words, “we were feeling this idea already for months…it was in the air”—and they realized that responding to email wasn’t actually a problem. As Brandon adds, “[It’s] kind of the pleasurable part of emailing because it means you're maybe progressing something forward.”