Aleem Mawani @aloo Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Aleem Mawani

@aloo

1,593

Followers

353

Following

58

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2,158

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Founder of @Streak , previously @Google , @ycombinator

San Francisco, CA

https://t.co/SDz5Ez1bDO

Joined April 2008

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

6 months

It's been a while since we've brought on new engineers to our team @Streak but we're excited to be growing our frontend web team! 🧵 on why a grizzled engineer like yourself should chat with us: 1. goldilocks company 2. interesting problems 3. totally unique interview

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

I've learnt more about building products from the online material @basecamp has released than my 3 year stint at Google. And thats saying a lot because I learnt a ton at Google. Thanks for making your process public @rjs

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

9 months

@paulg I'm still in awe that combustion engines even work. engineering miracle.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

@paulg That’s just like the first day of our YC batch where you told us that “you’re in, we invested in you, we’re not going to change our minds. Tell us everything especially the bad stuff”. Huge weight off our shoulders.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

5 months

Our goal @Streak is to get to $50M ARR with <50 employees. Why cap the team size? Because it just makes for a way better place to work. More craftspeople. Less managers. Forces focus. Each person has high impact. And you know everyones name👇

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

1/ We are building a killer new product @Streak . Our users have asked for it for years. Going to post daily about our strategy, design process, tough decisions and our *setbacks*. Follow along 👇 to see how we're going from idea to launch

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

@cgaunerd @AlecStapp @matt_levine They aren't raising more money either. Which means they aren't replenishing their bank accounts. Which means net deposits at SVB have been going down.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

If you're a small startup that banks with SVB and worried about making *payroll* specifically in the next few days - please reach out. I want to help (with cash - no docs/terms/bs)

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

@amasad If you're writing a chrome extension for gmail, highly suggest you use @inboxsdk so you don't have to do all the DOM hackery yourself. With it, you could prob have a <50 line solution to gpt3 completion for gmail.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

@levie It can get so much better with refinement:

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

10 months

Today we're launching @Streak AI. People log so much data in their CRMs but rarely make use of it. We're changing that with 5 new features 🧵...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

9 months

Our support team @Streak is doing a ridiculously awesome job. When a customer needs help, they get it. Fast.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

10 months

Getting ready for a fun @Streak launch tomorrow!

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

Shoutout to @clearbit and @maccaw - couldn't have launched @Streak 3 without you! Streak is a much smarter and automatic CRM because of the data you provide.

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Streak - Product Information, Latest Updates, and Reviews 2024 | Product Hunt

CRM in your Inbox. Streak helps you with business processes inside Gmail. Streak was announced as Google's 2018 Technology Partner of the Year, in recognition of our fully integrated CRM and deep,...

www.producthunt.com

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

Love the innovation in the email space. Building email clients is HARD, but if anyone has a shot at being the new standard for businesses, it's this one. Can't wait to build @Streak for @Shortwave :)

@startupandrew

Andrew Lee

3 years

Shortwave launches today! We’ve redesigned the email experience from top-to-bottom so you can email smarter and faster and actually enjoy your inbox. Check out our launch 🚀 blog post and 🧵 below:

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

We've been working on this for more than a year and it's so amazing to see it come together. We've been honing Streak for years and when I step back, it really feels like a completely different product. So excited to see what our customers can achieve with it!

@Streak

Streak

4 years

Today, we’re launching our biggest update ever. Streak 3: ➕ scans your inbox to suggest leads ✨ auto logs your team's email ⚠️ alerts you when you're about to email someone who is already emailing w/ your team 🏠 lives entirely inside Gmail

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

so this intermittent fasting thing is just "skip breakfast" right?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

10/ Also interesting that the customers we reached out to all had the same priorities: - follow ups on the same thread - stop sending followups if the recipient responds - basic stats - don't email on weekends/holidays.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

Part of it the speed at which I can try things and make mistakes. I only had a few at-bats at Google, but @Streak we're becoming better every 6 weeks.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

Had a lot of fun working on this for the last few months and the team worked hard to get it out 🚀🚀🚀 Here's why I think it's great... 🧵

@Streak

Streak

3 years

📨💫 Want to scale your outreach in Gmail and get more responses? 📨💫 We've got just the thing for you. Introducing our most requested feature... ever: mail merge with email follow-up sequences.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

We're looking for someone great to join our small and highly talented product engineering team @Streak Perfect combo of small team + challenging work for someone who loves web tech + shipping without bureaucracy at a profitable company.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

Getting really excited for this launch, happening mid next week!

@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

1/ We are building a killer new product @Streak . Our users have asked for it for years. Going to post daily about our strategy, design process, tough decisions and our *setbacks*. Follow along 👇 to see how we're going from idea to launch

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

5 years

@Tandem_HQ I know downtime can be tough, the team here @Streak thanks you for all your hard work! You're doing a great service to all those teams that are suddenly forced to go remote!

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

5 years

@kevinrose I see a few recommendations for @Streak - I would *not* use us because we're not focused on the personal CRM use case you're describing Haven't seen a product solve this, look like a maybe but its in closed beta

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

6/ ...we're just uniquely positioned to do a damn good job executing on it. By being in Gmail, we can make sending a drip email as easy as sending a single email.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

I'm loving the performance upgrade at @NotionHQ . Pages load super fast! Any plans to improve the perf of search/@ mentions?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

One of the most interesting company building threads I've read.

@aboodman

Aaron Boodman

3 years

@aloo @rocicorp That is a much longer post. I want to write it someday, but briefly: - Classic SV startups are not setup financially so they can be attractive to senior talent. It basically never makes sense to join an early stage startup financially vs bigco, your own co, or escape velocity co

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

5 months

ugh Google shipping their org chart again.... if I want to ask a question about something in my email, do I goto gmail? google search? gemini app? the new astra thing? magical tech wasted because large orgs are just hard

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

Building a product using #NoCode takes a surprising amount of code

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

1 year

@holdenmatt @dalmaer My favorite is @pipedream . It’s code all the way down but they handle the annoying stuff like oauth, logging and runtime environment

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

12/ Here are some early sketches for the main components

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

14/ Our solution was to just send using Gmail's compose. Then add a little sugar on top go from 1 email to N emails. It's good because: ✔️ easy to understand because you already know how to use it ✔️ easy to visualize your sequence ✔️ send your first sequence <5mins

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

@FredKSchott @steren I don't think this is possible? BQ charges by the GB scanned (based on which columns you reference). Even if you referenced all the columns, 20 GB would only cost 10 cents: Maybe you referring to another really large table too?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 months

@Austen we ( @Streak ycs11) are best if: - you do high touch sales with lots of comms with your customers - your team works primarily in gmail - you want the founders phone number

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

Our customer support team @Streak has been tirelessly improving, 83% of customers get a response within an hour! Next goal is 10 minutes.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

9/ ...they were really sophisticated at reaching out. Most *hacked* together our existing mailmerge and pipelines features to almost fully automate their outreach. Crazy convoluted. This def re-energized me, seeing how much we could improve customers day to day.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

Our new drip sequences product in @Streak is growing faster than anything else we've ever built. The team has made a ridiculously good product.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

incredible marketing and partnership

@agazdecki

Andrew Gazdecki

3 years

Announcement: @microacquire & @pipe are exclusively partnering to help more startups get acquired. We're allowing buyers & sellers to finance acquisitions almost instantly of all sizes. Today M&A sucks for startups & we’re changing that. Got Russ to chime in. Tres Commas. 🤘

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

4/ Even still, our mailmerge is super popular so we're doubling down and building what our users really want - automated followups. Turns out you get way more replies from follow up emails than from the first one you send, especially when they are personally crafted.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

1 year

@ttunguz We're starting to work on this @Streak . In prototypes, the best way to get the tone right is to give the LLM examples in the prompt of emails actually written by you. The emails generated then sound a lot more like you. Next step would be to show the most relevant examples - if

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

10 years

only in SF does your taxi driver give you startup advice

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

1 year

@harjtaggar great advice. @paulg had similar advice when we were pivoting: "don't be constrained by your old crappy idea" (we were trying to reuse our tech and customers)

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

6 months

@rjs Guesses on how they would use this in their own products? Easy example might be Siri that can act on your behalf in all your apps.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

5 months

Second time founders never make the mistake of registering their domain with their personal phone number

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

5/ So we're building an email drip tool that's dead simple, highly personalizable and just works. None of this is "new" or "innovative"...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

1 year

@dsiroker Have you seen basecamps ShapeUp method? Very similar - fixed ship date, variable spec. Helped us a ton @Streak

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

Our perf review process @Streak has historically taken 3 weeks to complete - and everyone was miserable doing it. In our latest cycle we cut it down to just 2 days. What did we cut out? Absolutely nothing. Just adding the 2 day constraint made everything faster/better.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

something thats worked well for us recently to build killer features: - focussed scope (small) - limited time (small) - freedom to make it great

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

11/ These convos were so high quality and enjoyable - a treat. I couldn't resist designing a solution for them. I know I should have distilled every interview, built out personas, prioritized all the use cases - but honestly it was more fun to just start sketching. So I did that.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

1 year

@snowmaker Not just for teams pivoting! Founders working on incorporating AI into their already successful products bump into them all the time too

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

17/ So in the next iteration - toned everything down to a single primary color - instead of using color to show which message you were editing, just added a simple selected state - added shortcuts on the gmail compose window to goto the previous and next messages

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

31/ Team is trying to push through it but we are going to have to pause adding new users to our alpha. Hopefully we can resume early next week.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

6 months

gemini 1.5 is really really good at reasoning over its huge context window. Can finally build stuff I was blocked on.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

@garrytan It's crazy how different this situation is for founders if they didn't raise an institutional round. If company bootstrapped or just had seed, this situation is so recoverable. Can make a great business with happy team & happy founders if you work on business for long term

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

3/ ...what users really wanted were replies. Yes they wanted to send out personal emails to a lot of leads, but really they cared how many people they could engage with. Our mailmerge wasn't optimized for engagement.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

9 months

@Streak we split our product development into Big Bets, Small Bets, and polish. We only ever work on one big bet at a time. In 2023 - we launched native integrations and Streak AI as our big bets, dozens of small bets and 100's of polish and bug fixes. In 2024.... 👇

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

got AI code gen working inside of @Streak , it's pretty epic. Customers won't need to know how to write javascript to customize their setup using our formula columns.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

5 months

But we need help scaling, so much left to do! We're growing our team for the first time in a while - engineering, design & non-technical roles. Interested?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

6 months

passkeys are so good.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

Super smart acquisition, these products were made for each other. We collaborated with the @DocSend team early and @rheddleston and team are the real deal!

@drewhouston

Drew Houston

4 years

Welcome @DocSend to the Dropbox family! Can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish together 🤗

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

At @Google I learnt that speed and latency have a huge impact on usage of web applications. Yet some of my favorite tools are really slow like @loom and @retool . They are both really successful. How would you explain this contradiction?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

2/ So what are we building? Time for a story... Streak has had a mailmerge feature for a while now but we didn't understand the real job to be done when we launched it. We thought users wanted to send mass emails that looked personal, so that's what we built, but...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

18/ really happy where this landed but still nervous about the implementation. It's pretty flakey right now. We're splunking deeeeeep into Gmail internals now to make it flawless...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

Useful skill for me as a founder: "if I were to start another company, how would I do things differently? Ok, just apply those things to my actual company." I've changed more than I thought I could.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

11 months

@Scott_Wiener @Artneville what was the original intention?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

11 months

Cmd-Z please. obvious mistake

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

@cgaunerd @AlecStapp @matt_levine Not every VC firm banks with SVB. Don't the % but my guess is they do a better job diversifying their banking partners.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

@RanHeimann @levie The end state is just an AI that directs the entire economy -> "Company A should build 20 widgets and sell 10 to Company B and 10 to Company C for price $Y.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

22/ Turned out to be too complex. Letting Streak choose the delay? Yah no one wanted that. Type anything? That was actually harder than using 3 dropdowns. That just left one way - dropdowns. So we just inlined the whole thing instead of this modal...

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Advanced delays for automated followups

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

GPT4 is gets so much better when it can search the web. Clearly LLMs need search, they'd don't replace it. Just realized that's why open ai partnered with Bing, they must have known Google would have blocked gpt from using Google search.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

@maccaw Bigger context window.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

Had an incredible referral/sourcing session with the team last week to fill a bunch of open roles @Streak . Amazing how well this worked when the entire team was in a room together. Thanks for the reminder @maccaw :

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

42/ Our beta testers love the product if the number of messages sent is any indication. Followups are growing to be a larger and larger % of the total messages we send, as would be expected.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

awesome move. @garrytan is the best investor I know. He's helped us on everything - big hard strategic questions all the way down to photoshopping mocks with us during office hours.

@ycombinator

Y Combinator

2 years

Today we're excited to announce that Garry Tan will be YC's next president and CEO. Welcome home, @garrytan .

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

It's crazy how *few* product surprises there have been since adding more users to our new drip functionality. The product we designed initially has aged incredibly well I think it's because we had a few, but really deep, user research sessions when we first started working on it

@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

Spent the last two weeks adding a bunch of polish and fixing bugs, just invited our next batch of beta testers!

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

hardest thing for me as a ceo for me is operating at the right amount of leverage. today was a good balance - 6 month strategic planning, deep technical/product brainstorm with eng team & worked to close a candidate. need to get more days like that.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

For any new founders out there, @garrytan is the real deal. Supported us for nearly a decade and has amazing breadth. From busting open photoshop during office hours early on to helping us with really tough people issues. if you can get him on your cap table, don't hesitate.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

Doing an AMA on @IndieHackers on all the stuff we've learnt growing @Streak

I founded a $10M ARR SaaS and made $40M in sales over 10 years

Hey everyone - I'm Aleem Mawani and I started Streak, a CRM in Gmail. Love the IH community and we'd like to think of ourselves as accidental members. W...

www.indiehackers.com

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

11 months

@chamath it's so rare to get an elite team together and have them execute at an elite level. we shouldn't want that to break up, we should want them to keep sprinting.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

We want @Streak users to have the best support experience possible. That means being extremely competent, timely and empathetic. We're growing our support team (fully remote), and I'd love to donate $500 to any charity if we hire someone you recommend:

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

we had 5x increase in our support volume on todays launch day. Our support team executed amazingly well and handled it with ease and had sub 30 min response times on average which is kind of... crazy!?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

16/ I though I hit onto something pretty great but both @alphacolin and @berlinjohnson pointed out some pretty obvious flaws in retrospect: - so much color overload and it wasn't clear what they even meant - what did save draft mean? why do you even need it?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

11 months

@vercel will you be supporting the new assistant APIs from openai in the vercel ai sdk?

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

8/ So how did we know what to build? I chatted with ~15 current users of mailmerge and just asked them what their biggest problem was. Unsurprisingly, most business owners were trying increase the number of potential customers they talked to. But surprisingly...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

A big part of listening is repeating what you heard. After user interviews for our new product, we did this by sending them a demo video walking through some mocks. Great way to confirm we were building the right product:

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

8/ So how did we know what to build? I chatted with ~15 current users of mailmerge and just asked them what their biggest problem was. Unsurprisingly, most business owners were trying increase the number of potential customers they talked to. But surprisingly...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

11 years

@ttunguz Much less talked about but Google BigQuery has been amazing for us. Cheap, fast, easy and can handle more data than we can give it

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

13/ Let's start with how we designed the core part of the experience - setting up and automated follow up sequence We wanted the thing to be damn simple. Every other tool we tried made us jump through hoops to just send emails

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

8 years

@nickbaum @semil lots of investors using us @Streak for deal flow. Assuming that's what you want? Happy to help...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

7/ quick admin thing: we've already started building but I'm going to walk you through all the nitty gritty details of our process and catch you up to the present using this mega thread, so follow along...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

10 months

prediction: SEO is actually going to be more important in the world of AI agents...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

7 months

Everyone can dunk on google and sundar all they want, but we'll be building gemini 1.5 into our product. Large context windows and advanced reasoning is huge for us. What it thinks about race doesn't affect us at all.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

6 months

Amazing love letter

@kocienda

Ken Kocienda

6 months

Today, the first public reviews about the Humane Ai Pin are now available for you all to read, In my career, I’ve worked on several 1.0 products you’ve probably used—the first iPhone is chief among them—and so I’ve been through this before. Let me run down some of the thoughts

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

9 years

3 hours into launch, @jazzychad already used @inboxsdk to make an awesome "Intro BCC Button" for gmail.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

9 years

really proud of what we built with the @inboxsdk , see @clearbit ’s experience building an app for gmail using the SDK

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

21/ Thought this dropdown was so cool. You could type in a number + pick a unit from a dropdown and then pick a time. Or you could just let Streak choose the delay. Or you could just type free form text and we'd interpret. Or you...

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

4 years

Loving the comments on @ProductHunt about Streak 3. Such a great community with people who dig talking about products. l https://www.producthunt.com/posts/streak-3-2#comment-1105220

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

3 years

26/ Ok timezones. The bane of every programmer. We had 3 choices for when messages should be delivered: ❌ use some fixed timezone (duhh no, we have i18n users) 👌 use the recipients timezone (great, but we don't have the data yet) 👍 use the senders timezone (we chose this)

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

6 months

@dsiroker @patrickc I think the reconciliation is that is actually very high quality. Maybe not to our 2024 design sense - but it is clear, concise and answers the exact question a user probably has.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

6 years

@romaindillet A quick clarification, many popular extensions like @Streak , @Clearbit and @Dropbox will be compatible day one with the new design. In fact any extension using our @inboxsdk library will be as well.

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@aloo

Aleem Mawani

2 years

Liking the new @gmail UI except for the 19 different shades of light blue/gray

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