I recently spoke with Jonathan Unikowski, founder and CEO of Avec, an email app for iOS that incorporates clever features to help you stay on top of your email. If anyone you know suffers from email mismanagement, let them know to check it out!
Micah Blachman: What was your initial motivation to create Avec?
Jonathan Unikowski: I remember when I was your age and I was on the internet, I remember things just felt much less noisy. There was just less stuff and there weren't social media feeds pushing content to you from all sides. There were websites you could go to, and there were communities on IRC, and it felt manageably small.
The amount of content on the internet exploded as the internet exploded, but our tools haven’t kept up with that. Things come at us from all angles, things that are very important, things that are less important, things that deserve our attention, and things that don't. So I was resolved to do something about it. AI models can help us read and sift through the things around us, but that’s still a very vague notion, so what I did is I started looking at the software I used, and asked myself to find a tractable place where I could actually make progress.
It became very obvious to me that email was an incredible place to start, because it's something that we all have. An email address is probably one of the first things you get when you first connect to the internet. And unfortunately, it's also ground zero for attention because it’s probably the easiest way that anyone can reach you and therefore a lot of people try to reach you through email.
MB: In general, what do you think people get most wrong about email?
JU: Everyone has a different relationship with their email inbox. Many people think that they’re so on top of their inbox that they don’t need a new piece of software—it’s just not a problem in their life. I think we were all deluded into thinking managing email is purely a discipline problem, and if only you had the right discipline and the right system and you kept at it, you would be on top of your inbox. I think that’s actually incorrect. It is actually the equivalent of saying to someone who is overweight that their only problem is a discipline problem, whereas the reality is that weight is this complex health consideration, and there's just the fact that there's maybe like a candy bar in your pantry and it's 10 p.m. and you’re feeling that you'd like something sweet and the candy bar is right there staring at you and you're just going to go grab it. Discipline is not the problem.
It’s a similar thing with email. Discipline is not the problem. The problem is the tools, which aren’t serving us. Because the tools are inadequate, they're forcing us to have discipline. I think discipline is very important in life, it’s good to have discipline. But email is the wrong outlet for that. There are more important and interesting places in your life to have discipline. There are tools that let you be on top of your e-mail without needing to be particularly disciplined. And if you're not on top of your e-mail, you're not failing. The tools are failing you. Whereas I think most people think they're failing—or the ones who are succeeding think they succeed.
MB: What did the product development process look like for you in creating Avec?
JU: We built something we wanted to use. That was the only rule. We did not do any market research. We did not do any focus groups. We frankly did not really look at what anyone else was doing. We essentially did none of the things that people will tell you you should do. Instead, we went back to the way I used to build websites when I was a kid, when I asked myself, “What do I want? If we have free rein and we can rebuild email from scratch, what would we want it to do?”
A year ago, we finally got to a prototype that barely worked, but was useful and that we wanted to use. Once we got to that point, we're like, “Okay, let's polish it a bit, make it a little bit more user-friendly, and go see if our family members and friends will use it.”
MB: How do you treat personal emails differently from mass emails or newsletters?
JU: The core thing we first started with is teaching an AI model to distinguish emails that are important and time-sensitive. We put months and months of development purely to be able to consistently figure that out for everyone who uses the app. We all have very different expectations in that respect. But in general, the broad rule is that we have to figure out what’s time sensitive, and we have to surface that urgently to our users, typically through a notification. Then there’s something that’s a degree below time sensitive, which are personal emails from people you know that are not necessarily urgent. Those might not warrant a notification in all cases, although very often they do—but they certainly warrant your attention and they’ll be presented to you as individual cards in your stack of email so that you can read them, engage with them, and respond to them.
Then there’s everything else: the shipping updates, the newsletters, the spammy emails. And we think that those, frankly, your email app should let you peruse those quickly, pick up the ones you're interested in and maybe want to read or want to save for later, but then for the most part be able to move past them and be able to do so very quickly. We've designed the entire application to enable our users to do that.
MB: I know you have AI email-writing features in the app. How do you feel about AI-generated emails?
JU: A world in which we are not writing, and AI is writing on our behalf, and nothing sounds like us, and we're not really involved in the process, is a really bad world. You're a writer, and you know that the process of writing itself is how you form your own opinions, how you fully form what you're trying to express. I don't think you can just short-circuit that and put a prompt into AI and then expand it to six paragraphs and have a great piece of writing. Even if what you get is great, it’s still not your writing. So we're not doing that.
What we're trying to do is to give our users ways to leverage AI to express themselves in places where maybe it would be very difficult to do so. And so that's why we started with mobile. If you've ever tried to write an email on mobile, it's incredibly painful. It is literally the worst place to write an e-mail. You're here with your two thumbs, maybe you're standing on the sidewalk because it's really urgent. Everyone who wants to write a good email goes to their desktop and does it there.
What all the other email services promise to do is to learn your writing style from past emails, and then you can prompt it. But the reality is that it doesn't really work. It yields the same thing that you would get by giving a sample to ChatGPT and giving it a prompt. So what we do in Avec is that we have this really cool voice-based feature where you hold down a button, you say a few words about what it is you want to say, and we'll do the first attempt. We'll try to generate an email that kind of sounds like you, but probably looks a little bit AI-ish, not quite like you. What we think is really important is giving you ways to continue shaping the email so that you're fully in the loop and you can very quickly get to a point where it might be a better email than you would’ve written yourself.
What you can do is press and hold that button again and say things like, “Oh, well, remove that em-dash over here and just end the sentence and capitalize the next letter.” Or something like, “Oh, I didn't mean to close off with ‘Best.’ I meant to close off with, ‘I'm excited to chat with you next week.’” Our system is designed so that those iteration cycles are extremely fast. You record a quick voice note and immediately the AI rewrites the e-mail. You get to shape the email much faster than if you had to use two thumbs. Because of this tooling, you can actually get to something that sounds like you.
Our goal is not to make AI-generated emails no one can spot. I think that's a really bad goal. Our goal is to make AI-generated emails that are better than the emails you would have written yourself but that are still like the emails you wish you had written yourself. That's the goal. AI-generated writing tastes bad. And it’s insulting sometimes. It's like the person wasn’t even willing to put in the effort to write to me. We don’t like that. We don’t want that.
Recently, I applied a test to our system. I had to write this extremely personal, extremely emotional email and I used the system to do it. It didn't do it right the first shot, but I got to something that I felt completely good about sending, that sounded like what I would have written. We can demand from our tools that they enable us to do that.
I think it is awesome if you can use different inputs than the keyboard or tapping to type on the screen, and get to something indistinguishable from what you would have produced if you had been on a keyboard.
MB: How did you decide to change the name of the company from Net to Avec?
JU: The name Net came to me in the state where you're falling asleep and you're not quite fully asleep, but you're not really awake. You're sort of in this twilight zone. One night, I knew I needed a name. I had this moment where I woke up, and I was like, “Oh my God, Net would be such a great name because it's like a net that captures the important thing, it references the internet, and it’s such a cool name.”
I went to a domain registrar and looked at net.inc and it was available. And I was like, “Oh my God, it's incredible. What a coincidence. Let's just name the company that.” And I didn't think about it much more than that. It's just the name. But then, as we started building out the product, what we came to realize was the name Net is very undifferentiated. It's pretty confusing. There are companies with “net” in their name that are gigantic consumer companies. Netflix comes to mind, and Microsoft has a NET framework, so there's all this complexity where it's like, “Okay, maybe it's a little bit too generic, it's not differentiated enough.”
We spent a bunch of time thinking about what we should call this product, especially now that we had a product that we could look at and touch and feel. Naming something is always a mix of very practical considerations. Is it unique enough? Is it differentiated enough? Also, is there a story attached to the name that we can really be inspired by?
Eventually, we landed on Avec, which is the French word for “with.” We thought this was extremely resonant on multiple levels. First, we're trying to find ways to help you work with AI where it feels a little bit more like an extension of yourself rather than this interview you addressed to a chatbot. This notion of “with” felt very resonant. We like the sounds, it's very dynamic, it's kind of intriguing, and there's a little bit of mystery.
Lastly, as you might have noticed, I have a French accent. I grew up speaking French, and so on a personal level, I felt like it was a great name, because the company is still very much founder-led, and there's some attachment to my personal history.
To me, email is such an interesting topic. It was invented to replace communication methods that took a lot of time out of people’s workdays. But responding back to emails, as any correspondent knows, has become a big task as well. If you receive lots of emails on a daily basis, as most professionals do, triaging and responding to emails can be tough.
People are always talking about a system to manage their email (as I have done), but that’s really not necessary. It’s so much easier and less stressful to just write back to them as soon as you see them. Not to encourage being glued to your inbox all day, but, if you have the time anyway, why not just write a response while you’re thinking about it? I’ve unfortunately found that starring/labeling/otherwise differentiating them to indicate that you will write back to them later just leads to procrastination.
Doing that with Gmail works if you’ve got time. If you don’t, Avec is perfect. It allows you to still write back to emails as soon as you see them, but incorporates mobile-first features that make it so much easier to manage writing back to emails on the go. They’re currently working on a desktop app, so get excited!