Help us build a better email inbox

We’re building an inbox for the age of AI and we need your help.

Email hasn’t changed for decades, and existing tools aren’t fit for the age of AI. Housecat is changing that. We’re building a better email inbox, with a built-in agent that helps you get real work done. Run workflows and automations to update the CRM or start a research task, all from inside your inbox. Or ask Housecat to prioritize the most important messages, and auto-resolve the rest.

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent a digital message between two computers running on ARPANET, an early precursor to the internet. He chose the @ sign to separate the name of the sender, and the computer the sender was operating on. It wasn’t even the main focus of his day job, but unwittingly he had sent the world’s first email.

Growing up in the 90s, email has pretty much always been a part of my life. Next year my personal Gmail address, which I still use, will be 20 years old, which makes me feel old. When I got that account as a teenager, it felt genuinely revolutionary. It was fast, simple and came with free storage.

Unfortunately the reality is that email has not meaningfully evolved over the last two decades, and in many ways has not changed much since 1971. At the same time the rest of our working lives have changed beyond recognition. We’ve moved everything online, with email joined by a host of other tools and communication channels like Slack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp/Signal, and dozens of software applications that might communicate with you in various ways, such as GitHub or your CRM.

A customer might send you a PDF by email, a colleague might comment on it in Slack, and the latest version might eventually end up in Google Drive. Now artificial intelligence is adding more complexity, more channels and more emails.

We’re building an inbox for the age of AI.

First we’re tackling email, but our long-term vision is to build the inbox for all your communication with both humans and computers / AI agents.

More emails are not the answer

Until today, most email applications have treated “doing emails” as the goal in and of itself. But of course the goal is not to send emails, but to actually do the real work.

In reality, replying is often only one small part of what needs to happen. An email might require you to research a company, read an attachment, update the CRM, arrange a meeting, discuss with a colleague, create a document or ask for approval from your manager. Completing those tasks usually means moving information manually between several different tools, or transforming the data: summarize, elaborate, combine.

Using AI tools to accelerate email sending and email replying is nice, but it only moves the backlog to another part of your workflow.

There are a huge range of tools available to build workflows for common business tasks, but nothing that actually allows you to control these processes from right inside of your email.

Why rebuild email?

We initially built Housecat as a collection of agent workflows to help small teams automate common business processes. The most common were all tasks that touched email: add a new company to the CRM from an email, triage which messages were important, track committed tasks, or extract commercial terms agreed over email into a new contract. And we heard time and time again that one of the tools that they interacted with most consistently every day was their email app.

That’s why we decided to make better email central to the experience of using Housecat.

Initially we didn’t think that we would have a full email experience. Early versions of Housecat enabled you to connect email, but did not fully replace existing email products. But this had some major drawbacks: we were giving users the incomplete view over their communication, and despite our goal of reducing tool fatigue we were now forcing them to use two tools, Housecat and email, instead of just one, email.

Most people I talked to had a similar story to me. They had been using some version of the same email tools for a decade or two. They were frustrated and felt like their email “was a mess” or that they were always playing catch-up. They wanted fewer, better tools, not more vibe-coded ones.

Eventually it became clear to us. We could only build a fundamentally better experience by owning the product surface. That was what would enable us to transform email into a tool that actually helps you get stuff done.

What we are building

Housecat is email built for the age of AI. We give your inbox its own AI agent, making it a tool where real work can now get done.

From any email, Housecat can update your CRM, save an attachment, create a document, open a GitHub issue or share something with your team in Slack. Combine threads of communication from multiple channels, and add richer context to your emails. Link Granola to see meeting notes alongside a sales conversation, or read interview feedback in the same view as a message to a candidate. Instead of copying information between tools, you can complete the next step in one place.

Less information overload and less distraction.

These are only the first examples. As Housecat learns to work across more of the software you use, your inbox will become a starting point for almost any task.

Help us design the future of email

AI is being added to almost every category of software. In email, that has mostly meant writing replies faster. That is useful, but it feels like a small improvement to a much larger problem.

Our vision is to turn email from a passive container of messages into an active workspace that helps you get real work done. Housecat will understand what matters, keep track of what has happened and help complete the work stuck inside each thread.

Our beta program is ongoing and we’re looking for more users to test our email product. All you need is a Google Workspace or Gmail account.

Drop me an email at thomas@housecat.com or sign up for the beta on our website at home.housecat.com/beta.

Thanks,

Team Housecat