Bobby Goodlatte launches Sunflower, an AI-native email client designed to work for you instead of against you

Say goodbye to the headaches of out ofome advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we got Bobby. They are coming to the studio. Yep. Um I'm going to do some uh V3 generations for all of our partners. Get those in the mix.

Pull those up. I think it'll be fun. Get a little creative. Uh we got Bobby coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Thank you for having me. Where are you? Are you in Miami right now? I am the last one standing in Miami. Yes. Let's give it up for Miami. Stuck around. Thank you very much. Yeah.

Yeah. I I love Miami. I It's beautiful.

Every time I get to go visit it, it's always struck me as uh like the It's like a classier version of Las Vegas for tech and it actually worked really well where in every industry there's always like the CES conference that happens in Vegas and it's a little bit below tech's, you know, prestige.

And so if tech could assemble in Miami for events, that's great. Be quiet. We gave it a real college structure. It was happening for a while. You know, there was Hereticon and like the best conference I've ever been to. Exactly.

And and it was cool that you you get people that come from New York and they're not just going to go home on the uh after the conference, they're going to stay. Same thing with SF. Same thing with LA. So it was actually a feature that not everyone was there.

I feel like if you throw a conference in LA or SF, a lot half the people are just going to go home. Uh, it was special for a moment. I Anyway, I got a What's up? I gota dox Bobby. Oh, yeah. Because he pulled up to Heredicon in a Ferrari. Let's go. We love You remember I called it out.

We were walking is actually just getting the buttons redone. Oh, really? You have the button. You have the button issue. The sticky buttons. Stay. You got sticky buttons.

No, it's seriously it's it's like the worst thing to be in this magnificent machine and then it's like I don't know somebody sticky like ate a hamburger. You have a date and you you you you okay great I'll pick up my Ferrari and then she tries to adjust the seat. It's sticky. It's like she's like this is disgusting.

I know. It's terrible. Yeah. What were you doing in here? This is terrible. That's all fixed now. That's all fixed now. Okay. That's good. That's good. We're glad to hear it. Find us. Uh but yeah, give us the news. Give us the update. give us a little introduction on yourself for those who might not know.

Yeah, so I'm so glad you guys had me on today. Uh we had a very big announcement today. So um this is something I've been thinking about for 15 years and we announced our new email client called Sunflower today. Cool. Um basically Thank you. Thank you. It is like basically the opposite of inbox zero. Okay.

Like I think you should have to have an email client that makes you work for it, right? In other words, like you load up inbox zero. I don't care how many keyboard shortcuts. I don't care what what what you give me.

But if I'm having to triage every single email that comes in, you know, keyboard shortcut this way, that way. Yep. From the Applebee's email, you know. No. Yeah. Yeah. You need an email client that actually works for you. Okay. So um on our marketing website we don't mention the word AI one time. Huh. Wow.

But this thing is entirely this this product would not be possible five years ago. Okay. It's um you know if you want to be if you think you need to be a superhero to use your inbox, there's a product for you. We're building a product for actual humans. Bold.

And uh it it launches, you know, the the weight list launches today. sunflower. me. Yeah. Walk me through the product. The product is like in my phone before this because literally we we broke Slack today. Like that apparently there's a limit to how many notifications it can send you.

Like it just is dinging, dinging, dinging. That's great. Amazing. Uh and the product is like already like you guys you guys are the product's like real. You guys are using it, right? This is not you're not just launching a weight list. Like there's there's something under the hood.

We've been working on this for a year and a half. I use it every single day myself. Yeah. There's about a dozen people right now who have this. Yep. Give you guys uh early alpha access. Yeah. So, talk to me about the actual workflow. I imagine I still have an email address.

People can still email me, but I imagine an LLM is scanning every email that comes in. Am I seeing the emails? Am I I I mean, I've used Gmail's Gemini features. I one time I randomly clicked it and it just typed a response and it was like kind of decent, but it's honestly just a lot of clutter in the UI right now.

Um, how are you thinking about You're kind of hot on the hunt here. I'll be honest. Yeah. Well, I've been thinking about this.

I've actually was thinking I should just I should just get an LLM to summarize every email and just text it to me and then I can just text back if I want to respond and I just never look at my inbox ever again. Apple tried and current mail. app. It's It's That's not good. Total dog. Yeah.

It's just so funny that like the default state of email is like here's stuff that's important, here's stuff that's not important, and then it's only ranked by when it hit your inbox. Yeah. Which is kind of silly because status quo of email is a to-do list filled out by other people. Yep. Totally.

And that's that's it, right? You shouldn't be beholden to that, right? Just because someone sends me an email doesn't I mean I get a lot of emails. Yeah. Uh anyways, so yeah, you were you were kind of close. Um we're going to reveal our hand more and more publicly, but today was like the firing the starting gun.

Like we're building in public now. So you're going to hear a lot more. Boom. Don't share your revenue. If it gets too high, people will copy you. We don't like building in public. Based based on the signups you had today, like we are cash profitable if if everyone converts.

But how much how much uh how much of your time are you are are you going to be spending here versus investing going forward? Yeah. Um that's a good question. You know, I personally funded this company uh for the alpha like you know I I to be able to read people's emails. You mean I'm kidding.

I totally read I can't by the way I can't read anyone's emails an exhaustive security review process with Google right now. Yeah. So no there's no reading you sign up. You can sign up just Google. Just Sundar. Just Sundar. Yeah. Sundar can Sundar can read your emails, but not Bobby. I bet I bet he can actually.

I bet I bet they're pretty locked down over there. Um but yeah, I mean I remember uh the mailbox days and that launched. Um uh and one of the things that I loved that I loved was that once you got off the incredibly long wait list, it basically tricked you into just archiving everything.

uh which I thought was a great paradigm because you kind of declare email bankruptcy. You're not deleting these emails so they're still there. And just that idea of hey it you can you can archive things.

I had never archived an email before and I think a lot of people are in that boat where they have unread emails and they've read emails and they have a number that's like 10,000 next to their email app. Um what do you think about a funny story about that please? So I was friends with Gentry when he made cool. Yeah.

And I worked at Facebook at the time. Yeah. And I went on this hike with my friend Bo and uh literally it's like the Kalao Trail in Hawaii. It's like a two-day hike. Like you're trekking it. The entire time he just talked about email the entire time.

He talked about email and the fact that he was about to propose to his now wife. And I said, "Well, you're on this engagement ring. " Anyways, so I took a photo of him. Uh it's beautiful photo, you know, right at the end of the trail. And if you remember that app, you know, when you got to inbox zero, right?

You you saw this beautiful image. And I and he hated that app the whole time. It just it just launched. He was ranting to me the entire time about how much he hated Mailbox. I was like, "It's actually a pretty good app. I'm friends with Gentry, etc. , etc.

" But anyways, so when I got back from the hike, I sent Gentry an email and I said, "Hey, would you would you guys put this this image into the app like as the you know, you're done like inbox zero state and so and then I took a screenshot and I sent it to him. I said, "You're in the app now.

You're in the app that you you kind of hated that you despised. That's amazing. That's hilarious. " And he he took it a good chance. It was is great. Yeah, but we're not about inbox zero. I I think inbox zero is a flawed concept. I think like you know we're It's funny. I want you to do this for text. Right.

Right now, I have 3,873 unread texts. And I have that because I don't feel an obligation like just because somebody had my number at some point.

And like I I really try to respond to the stuff that's important and pressing, but I'm not going to like get home from work and be like, "Oh, I I got to respond to this person instead of hang out with my kids, right? " Like it's it's not No, of course. Everyone feels entitled to your time. Yeah. Right.

I, you know, look, I'm an investor. I get the same emails probably we all do, right? Like about 20 a day. And they're all like drip auto campaigned follow-up.

So, it's like they send you a cold pitch email and then you get you get the email, then you get the email, and then and then every single successive email like tries to guilt you into actually, you know, replying. Like start using more and more emotionally manipulative tactics. Y And it's like, no, no, no.

Just because you know my email address does not entitle you to my time. Yeah, I think that's right. What do you think about? Are you gonna are you going to tag Are you going to are you going to like identify like emails that are being dripped versus, you know, artal organic farmtotable emails? We're working on that.

Um, you know what we're also working on? I again, you know, there's a funny Steve Jobs quote. Isn't it funny to ship that leaves from the top? But here you go. Um, that's great. Um, you know, you know, like email trackers, you know, like obviously Superhum does this like I'm like, you know, you see, you've seen it.

Y, we both allow you to block inbound uh trackers and we'll also let you send your own. Nice. So, our thing is like we are just so 100% focused on the individual user.

M um so in other words like if you want to block um these trackers perfect we'll let you do that and then you can send your you can send a tracker of your own. I like having those trackers. I like letting the SDR know I read this 10 times and I'm still not responding. Yes.

You know that that's that's the feature you should build is a feature to open and close the email. That's a better feature. Yeah. Yeah. It just keeps pinging the pixel. So the SDR is like this person. They're reading it for hours every day. What? But they haven't responded. What's going on?

You just do their tracking pixel. What What is your take on Eric Mikovsky, founder of uh Pebble. He started this company Beeper, eventually sold it to Automatic. Um and the whole idea was get into the iMessage world, create one unified inbox for all the different messages.

I think he had a knockout dragout fight with Apple uh because he was reverse engineering some of the APIs. Um obviously there's changes on in big tech around antirust and it maybe now is the time to put pressure on that. Uh is there a world where we could see text and email kind of unify at some point?

What's your view on kind of the long term here with big tech? I mean look, we we have a we have a long-term strategy. I'm not going to come on your podcast and just spill all the means. Spill spill activate golden retriever mode. What was that?

Activate golden sign up for golden retriever mode where you're where you're friendly and dumb. Yeah. Yeah. Golden retriever would just tell golden retriever. Tell everyone. No. No. No. No. You can you can come on again and you know you know spell I one of your companies and I passed another one. So Okay.

Um anyway, yeah, future of text email. So, I'm mostly concerned about email. I think email it's like what's old is new again, right? And so, if I again, if I if I if I were a ship that's spilled from the top, here's what you have to here's what I have to say.

Um just like Apple built iMessage on top of SMS, I think there's a layer to be built on top of email. Mhm. That's all I'm gonna That's all I'm gonna tease. Give us more anyway. Yeah. No, no, I think it's I I think I think that's an interesting Yeah. framework.

So, I I don't I don't want to own all communication like I I don't want to, you know, pull pull it on one place. I just want to clean up a mess that is email. Okay. Yeah. It is an interesting time, right?

because like AI is transforming everything, but yet I feel pretty confident that I will have an email address that I have to use in 15 years and like that sounds kind of crazy and silly, but at the same time it's not going away. Fax machines.

We talked with TJ yesterday about how he was spending 30% of their dev resources or something like that on fax machines, right? Pill pass. When I worked at Facebook, we had we launched as a joke just the Techrunch network only. We launched a feature called fax this photo. And they covered it. Wow. No way. Yeah. Yeah.

It was literally launched to troll them. Oh yeah. You can Google this story like Techrunch Facebook this photo. Um my engineering buddy Evan uh we were we were launching all these things one day. Fax your photos. Not 2009. Wow. Yeah. There you go. That's amazing. Okay, so Facebook punked us.

This isn't really going live for everyone. Tech Network. They they they tried to like pretend like they were in on the joke, but no, they were. That's very funny. Got him. Also, by the way, our fun with tech didn't know the joke either.

And so this guy Blake Ross, he had to run upstairs like in a in a in a frantic rush saying, "Guys, guys, guys, guys, it's just a joke. It's just a joke. " Yeah. full stack verticalized MOG. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming. What's the real thing? Anyways, Bobby, this this was super fun.

Congrats on the launch. Uh I'm excited to try the product and come back on. Come back on as you have more uh more news to share. Amazing. Uh sunflower. me if I can get a plugin. For sure. Let's do it. Go check it out. We'll talk soon. Go there now. See you guys. And if you're trying to