A Time Machine for Your Email

TLDR: Join the waitlist for our new email app, Cora. Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

My work day is defined by two key events, at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. 

That’s when Cora delivers my brief—a personalized newsletter filled with the important, but not urgent, information I receive throughout the day. The time in between? Productivity bliss (and sleep and fun).

Cora is Every’s newest product. It’s an email client that turns your inbox into a story using AI. We’ve been working on it for six months. We initially decided to experiment with using AI for email after we created our prompt builder Spiral—which automates 80 percent of repeat writing tasks, in your voice and personality—and realized how well AI could mimic a person’s writing style. 

In Cora’s first iteration, it focused on a different problem—one of email efficiency—and it drafted responses for you. It vectorizes thousands of your emails to understand who you talk to, about what, in what style and tone. And it’s really good at this: Cora drafts more than 50 percent of my emails now.

An important part of drafting responses well is learning what emails actually need a response. Once we built the tooling to determine what necessitates a response and what doesn't, we realized something we couldn’t ignore: 90 percent of our emails are notifications. They are distractions. They don’t need to be read right away, or even at all, yet they’re side-by-side with critical messages. And despite the communication patterns that exist within all of our inboxes, email is still an endless, chronological, non-hierarchical to-do list that everyone but yourself gets to control.

Sponsored by: Every

Tools for a new generation of builders

When you write a lot about AI like we do, it’s hard not to see opportunities. We build tools for our team to become faster and better. When they work well, we bring them to our readers, too. We have a hunch: If you like reading Every, you’ll like what we’ve made.

• Automate repeat writing with Spiral.
• Organize your computer with Sparkle.
• Write something new—and great—with Lex.
• Deliver yourself from email with Cora.

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I used to pride myself on being an inbox-zero kind of guy. If I had five minutes between meetings or 10 minutes to spare waiting for the subway, I’d hammer out emails and clear my inbox. I was the CEO of a startup, and that’s what CEOs do—they’re always productive. But it wasn’t until we built Cora that I discovered the truth: I wasn’t being productive and managing my inbox—I was drowning in it. I wasn’t cultivating a garden; I was endlessly pulling weeds from it that others had tossed in.

Here’s Cora in a nutshell:

The beauty of Cora is that it doesn’t stop me from dealing with my email—in fact, it’s the opposite.

It enables me to immediately address urgent messages that require a response and  gives me a head start by drafting responses. At the same time, it archives everything non-urgent that may distract me, like emails that don’t need responses, newsletters, comments, calendar notifications, and so much more. It then organizes these emails into a brief that I can review twice a day, at 10 times the speed I normally would.

The result: I hardly look at my email over the course of my day—yet I’m faster to respond to those that matter, more informed about those that don’t, and more focused on execution outside of my inbox.

The chart below shows a subset of the users who have begun using Cora. The left-hand column is how many briefs they’ve received, the middle is how many they’ve opened, and the one on the right is the percentage. This tells me three things:

1. Most people like Cora. Like, a lot.
2. If you don’t like Cora, you stop using it almost immediately.
3. If you do like Cora, you use it multiple times a day. It’s super sticky.

My instinct is that users are enjoying Cora because it’s not an “AI email assistant” (we ban that language here). It’s an entire email methodology—some mixture of time blocking and inbox zero—that you are forced to use. It’s an opinionated way of managing your email inbox that has freed me from the mentality that maintaining inbox zero equals high-impact productivity. 

My job at Every is to inspire, organize, and push the general managers of our products and our entrepreneurs in residence to do great work. Cora is certainly that, and with everyone on the team using it, we all have a bit more time in our days to deliver on that promise.

We also build AI tools for readers like you. Automate repeat writing with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Write something great with Lex.

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