Jacob Bank
@jebank
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Building AI agents and sharing them. Founder/CEO @relay. Was PM Lead @gmail, @googlecalendar, CEO @timefulapp (acq by @google), Stanford AI PhD dropout
Joined August 2011
We’re building a new company @tryrelayapp to make it effortless for every team to run a tight ship! Sign up for early access here and read more about what we’re up to
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@joshuavoydik European investor: I would also like to speak to your GDPR compliance representative, confirm that you’ve been profitable with Arr > 1m for the last 14 quarters, and then I will consider a pre seed investment of 50k on a 60k post money valuation.
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@aayushaeran @anothercohen Yup consent from the consumer user is one step, here are a few other components of the project I remember. I'm sure this list is incomplete. 1. Designing a consent experience for the enterprise admin and enterprise end user.2. Creating a special "read only" object type that's.
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🚀we launched a lot this month!.
In addition to the AI features we announced this week, we launched 124 new integrations across 27 apps this past month 🤯. Including @airtable, @asana, @AssemblyAI, @Dropbox, @github, @loops, @NotionHQ, @retableio, @hellosmartsuite, @Square, @stripe, @Zoom & others!. 👇
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New Gmail!
"It's the best thing to happen to email since, well, the original Gmail.” via @Forbes and @Sunstreaker84.
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I always wonder a little bit when people at startups with <20 people talk about things like:. - OKRs.- strategy meetings.- product reviews.- what their EA / chief of staff does for them. We just haven't needed any of those things. - Our plan for each 2-month cycle is a one page
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Exciting to see the very well-written article by @psawers about @tryrelayapp in @TechCrunch. It's a great overview of our goals and approach!
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After 6 months of hard work on SEO, it’s starting to pay off!. We knew that search was going to be a natural way for users to discover @relay. People tend to find an automation tool by searching for a specific way to connect two apps (e.g. “stripe new subscriber notification
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After 6 months of hard work, we had our first week with over 1000 clicks from Search 📈 !. We started in January with a one page document of our plan, and here’s a slightly condensed version. Strategy: Our goal is to reach high intent, product-aware users that (a) already
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There are some things that you can't really say about yourself; you have to wait for other people to say them about you. For example, I certainly believe that @relay is much easier to use than Zapier. But of course I would say that. It doesn't mean much coming from me!. Luckily
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I made a ton of mistakes as a 23-year-old first time founder, especially in growing and managing the team. I’ve learned a lot about recruiting and HR since then, and I jotted down a few playbooks that may be useful. check them out here!
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Vertical solution or horizontal lego bricks?. This is probably the toughest and most frequent strategic conversation that we have at @relay . Many, many smart people have told us that we should pick a more specific vertical or function and entirely focus on building a solution.
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@michlimlim yeah! also true for "strength of weak ties". a disproportionate number of things like job opportunities, future partners, etc come through people we don't know well and have different social networks.
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Does Product Hunt help with SEO?. I've written a couple of posts about how the value of a Product Hunt launch isn't so much in the additional signups you get on that one day, but rather the compounding value over time as you get picked up by newsletters and other sites. We did
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Ok I think we’ve figured out a way to make AI actually useful for tons of people. First, two observations:. 1) Chatbots are cool, but they’re fundamentally limited by the fact that you have to go talk to them for them to do anything. 2) Agents that work for you while you sleep
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Who are the best Notion creators and consultants to follow? Especially looking for folks that are experts in using Notion as a CRM, ATS, or project management tool.
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Is it just me, or are Github actions down way more than you'd expect for a product of that scale?
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Agents! Everyone's talking about them, but. it's still totally unclear exactly how they'll be useful to most of us. Here's our quick take:. 🤖 An AI Agent is a "bot" or entity that is equipped with certain capabilities (actions) that it may perform semi-autonomously so that.
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@anaganath They also did a great job of representing their interviews as really hard (similar to Jane street) which attracted a lot of great people to try to apply.
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@raphaelschaad @dflieb @HarryStebbings @dflieb i remember back at Google when TGIF presentations had typically become totally sterile and full of corpspeak, you just pulled out your phone for your demo and showed everyone the new Photos features in the real app with your real pictures. 100x better than any scripted.
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My fellow boring B2B SaaS people: what are you going to do with Sora?.
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Video! We're pretty sure it's going to be important for at least two reasons:. 1) Video is increasingly becoming the default medium for people to learn how to do things. Watching a video is almost always a better way to learn than reading a blog post. I certainly use video
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Super cool to see @NotionHQ experts like @ZikiDoesNotion starting to find @relay valuable! If you use Notion, you'll probably need to add some automations, and we think we're building the best way to do it :).
If you’ve never heard of @relay you’re missing out BIG TIME. is an automation app that has been getting a lot of traction lately. And for a good reason. What makes them unique on the market is their Human-In-The-Loop functionality. This functionality
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It's been really interesting to see people use AI steps in @relay to do things that would have previously would have required some programming skill with a simple (or not so simple script). These little utilities aren't mind blowing like AI-generated music or videos, but they're
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@HarryStebbings Isn't it also useful to have some bounds on how much capital you actually want / need as part of the raise. e.g. "We're looking to raise between 7 and 10m at a 15-20% dilution" which still gives a wide valuation window for the market to land in. Learned this one from @apartovi.
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Agents are powerful, but they can be unpredictable and hard to control. We've developed something new that we're calling a "mini agent" that I think strikes a really nice balance between power/flexibility and predictability/control. Here's how it works:.- You set up workflow.
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Why I think problem discovery and validation is a little bit different in the productivity space.
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I loved studying languages growing up, and I always had a secret wish that one day I'd be one of those people that's effortlessly fluent in a dozen languages. Sadly. that didn't happen. I was able to muster passable high school French, toddler-level Hebrew, and tourist-level.
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@ThePeterMick @relay saves you time by automating actions across apps. Unlike others (eg Zapier), you can add human in the loop steps. Check it out!.
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Hey @rajivayyangar, how might we get @relay on Product Hunt's list of Zapier alternatives? I think we're more relevant and higher rated than most of the products on there, but I'm not sure exactly how it works. Thanks!
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@mekkaokerekebye It’s amazing how different being a PM at a big co is from being a pm/founder at a startup. At a big co it’s all about developing intuition about what’s easy vs hard, which hard things are worth doing, and how to address the long poles early (especially if it involves aligning.
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Bay Area hike recommendation: Tennessee Valley -> Muir Woods -> Muir Beach loop
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@bykahlil @getivella Rooting for you! Never seen this done before, but really nice job laying out what you’ve built. Since the talent on your team would be a large part of the acquisition rationale, I wonder if it’s worth sharing more info on that.
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@anothercohen Is there a reason you can't (a) add the event to a shared calendar, or (b) invite each account as an attendee? Both would have the effect of keeping the event up to date for all of the accounts.
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One of the cool things about integrating with most of the major LLMs is that we can see which models perform best for which use cases. In some cases, you might need the large context window of Gemini or the writing skills of Claude Opus. But sometimes those are both overkill and
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Just got the coolest connection request on LinkedIn. He told me he lives in the Bay Area AND he works in tech! Couldn’t believe it.
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@growing_daniel Brilliant, right? Many more people are talking about the Canva event than otherwise would even if they’re dunking on it.
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I've been trying to figure out a reliable way to determine which use cases can be fully automated and which need a human in the loop, and I might have something useful. In short, there are 3 key dimensions to consider for a given use case. 1. How high are the stakes?. 2. How.
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@anothercohen you should keep using clockwise for that. if you're interested, i can tell you why it may be harder than you think for Google to build it natively (don't work there anymore so that may have changed), but don't want to interrupt the shitpost.
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I just saw the clip where Eric Yuan’s son made a 3 over Lebron James’s son in garbage time in a Stanford - USC basketball game. How did I miss this???.
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Spring forward is not fun, but I have a silver lining for you!. If you're in the US and work with people in Europe, you have one more hour of overlap for the next 3 weeks, since they don't move their clocks until March 31. Move all of those early morning meetings back a bit and.
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Woohoo! @relay is making onto lists. Now time to climb the ranks :).
When it comes to automation, you have plenty of options, here are popular ones:. - Zapier.- Make (Integromat).- n8n.- Pipedream.- Tray .io.- Workato.- Power Automate.- Relay .app.- Activepieces.- Pabbly.- Integrately.- IFTTT.- GAS (Google Apps Script).
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@aayushaeran @anothercohen Yeah it came up a ton! The main challenge is is that consumer data and enterprise data are governed by very different policies and regulations (e.g. wipeout when an account is deleted, legal retention for litigation, how GDPR applies, who owns the data, etc). Rendering data.
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@buccocapital Problem for those cos is that it's the wrong attrition. The best and most confident people are the ones leaving.
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No better feeling than a user telling us they appreciate that we've built a high quality product for them. Btw we'd love to build an @OpenPhone integration at @relay but it looks like the public API isn't available yet.
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@CSMikeCardona @ChiefAutomation @relay Yup we’re definitely not close to as comprehensive as Zapier is in terms of integrations (we have ~90 to their 7000), but if you want a really well crafted, modern experience with some cool new features (eg human in the loop steps) check out @relay.
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Here's a common recruiting mistake I've made, and I've seen lots of others make it too. Recruiting is not over when a candidate accepts an offer!. There are so so many opportunities for things to go off the rails between the accepted offer and the new hire becoming a successful.
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@NWischoff I'm very curious what the numbers are for the increasingly common "Seed 2" rounds that fall somewhere in between those Seed and Series A numbers.
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@rabois @NeilThanedar much better for employees to have a common FMV that’s way below preferred price, right? Especially in the early days.
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This is a big one for us! We've seen a lot of traction with @NotionHQ users recently because @relay provides both a cleaner experience and deeper Notion support than other automation tools. Excited to get more feedback!.
Exciting news! We're now in the @NotionHQ integration marketplace and we just rolled about a bunch of Notion specific goodies (like support for rollup fields).
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If you're an investor getting lots of monthly updates today, I have something cool for you!. You can set up a playbook in @relay that automatically triggers every time you receive an investor update email, uses AI to extract key metrics (ARR, runway, etc) and a short summary,.
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Who's the best in the world (person or company) at influencer marketing? Looking for advice!. More context: we often find that @relay is useful for a certain type of person, e.g. real estate agents in Texas or HR leads at startups, and we want to figure out how to reach more.
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@anuatluru 2 years. If you quit before that you haven’t given yourself enough time to really try.
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@HarryStebbings If you want to solve the biggest problems, don't you have to compete with other great people?.
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@dflieb @rajatsuri Related: now that our two kids are 3 and 1, watching both is weirdly easier than watching just one as they can entertain themselves and only need a tiny bit of supervision.
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How directly should your reference your market-leading competitor if you're a challenger?. Here's something I've really been struggling with. It's really hard to communicate in 5 words or less what your startup does. Almost all 5 word tagline sound stupid and vague, like "a.
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We've seen a pretty cool emergent behavior of users sharing workflows - typically via screenshots - to both show off automations they're proud of and to give others ideas of what to build. We're working on a little feature (relay.snap) that will make it really easy to take a
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@thisiskp_ @PaddleHQ @relay @PaddleHQ has been awesome for us! Saved us a ton of hassle in dealing with VAT around the world. We’re also really excited about the partnership because we think pretty much every Paddle customer will find @relay useful for integrations and automations.
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@erica_wenger Cool to hear! There's definitely an important distinction between highly crafted, personalized cold emails and auto-generated sales spam. For this class of email, what kind of reply rate do you get? 5%? 20% 50%?.
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@ivanhzhao My take is that we will indeed have even more specific tools, and so we'll need lots of help from an integration/automation layer to help us connect them. That's why we're building @relay :).
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@AmasCreates So much great tooling these days in everything from productivity tools to tools that manage mechanics (e.g. payroll, taxes, etc), so I'd definitely say easier. Yes more competition but also much bigger markets, so net net, happier today than in 2013 when I started :).
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How do impressions and engagements on LinkedIn work?. I've been curious about this for a while, so I crunched the numbers for my top 50 posts. - Impressions ranged from 4,107 up to 80,765.- Engagements ranged from 27 up to 647. - The average number of impressions per engagement
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This is a really cool feature for playbooks that need to connect multiple apps! Let me know if you want a demo :).
🗄️ Relay now lets you add multiple external Data Sources to a playbook!. Before data sources, playbooks were limited to importing data just from its trigger source. Now, you can connect multiple apps to a playbook, data will be available to use anywhere in your playbook. (1/2)
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@aNotioneer @ZikiDoesNotion @relay A few types that we tend to see people bring over from Zapier:.1. High-volume use cases (@relay is quite a bit cheaper).2. Use cases that have Paths that need to merge back into one.3. Use cases where you need to wait for an object status to change within the workflow (e.g. wait.
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@CeciStalls @ethankurz Interesting! Don't usually hear of Zapier as a developer platform, though it's certainly an important component in their ability to deliver so many integrations to non-technical audiences. @ethankurz if you like that market, you should definitely check out @relay :).
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@mattwensing I think this was the easiest way to filter out investors and advisors you shouldn't listen to even a decade ago, no?.
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