You can't duct-tape AI on and call it done.

A humble beginning

We spent all evening trying to come up with a blog post. It's me and my cofounder. My cofounder went to bed, and after two hours of trying to learn how to blog, I realized I had somehow drifted into the shit I don't want.

Writing a blog post to sound like the kind of company we started Mellovy to fight is ironic. So I ripped everything out. I started over from the manifesto and just was honest instead. What are we doing? Why are we pretending to be this big fancy company when, in reality, we have no idea how to blog? We are flying blind.

Maybe that's what founding a company is. Calculated falling. Well, that makes no sense, but you get it. So Zander, when you read this, I'm sorry for totally butchering your post. I hope you'll forgive me.

We’re a new company. We’re working night and day. Hell, right now it’s 02:58 and I need sleep. We’re working very hard for the coming launch, and we’re excited to show you what we’ve been building. We’re slightly scared that no one will care about it. Life is a bunch of fears. We do what we want. We just do it scared instead.

It isn't someone copying the idea that worries us. It's launching in an empty forest. Will there be a sound? Launching something and not knowing if anyone will see it feels personal. Maybe being based in Sweden / the EU will be a perk. A lot of the companies we see are from the US. With the geopolitical environment being what it is, being European might matter to some people.

We want to be vulnerable. The post should be that. If that makes someone use it against us or feel it's not how a company should write, so be it. That's not our problem. If us being ourselves scares clients away, we didn't want them anyway.

But this isn't only a post about being scared and not knowing what we're doing. We started Mellovy because something about the way work is being organized pisses us off.

What pisses us off?

We keep hearing the same promise about AI. Become more productive and your work gets easier. But productivity is a trap. Become more productive and your reward is more work for the same paycheck. Are you an overachiever? Has doing more ever left you with less to do? Me neither. I've seen the other side too. Coworkers who slow down on purpose, because finishing early got them more work. That pisses me off. The incentives point the wrong way.

We think about incentives a lot. Our company should be aligned with our clients' incentives.

If Mellovy gives our clients more output and leaves them with more work to manage, we've built the wrong thing.

Wherever I go, I hear and read the same advice. "Manage your agents." "Orchestrate your agents." Instruct them, watch them, and correct them. I do more, but I have less energy left. With one employee misaligned with the company, a manager can usually course-correct. Add twenty agents to that employee. What happens with twenty agents doing the wrong thing? Add a second person with a different idea of what the company is trying to achieve and forty agents produce slop. All that advice about agents promises to save you time. But misaligned agents produce content that degrades the agents of other employees, and those agents produce even more slop. It spreads like an infection. Finally, cleaning it up is a huge pain in the ass. Did you really save time? I'd say no. AI didn't create these problems. It makes the ones that were already there easier to see.

We started Mellovy because of these problems. Our vision is to build the companies of the future, and we want to help people do it. Mellovy isn't for everyone. We're building it for driven A-player founders and tech-forward companies. Like in the dot-com boom, you can't duct-tape AI on and call it done. You have to rethink and rebuild.

We're our own first customer. We run Mellovy on Mellovy. The way we work is what we can show you right now. We refuse to play the vaporware game, even when pretending to have everything figured out would make a cleaner post.

Mellovy is not for everyone. Whoever wants to be told how things are done will be angry, and that is the intent. Let the rest be ordinary. We don't want to build a company that needs to pretend certainty to keep the right people interested.

That is not a small ambition. We want to give a brilliant, ambitious person the leverage of a much larger company. We want small groups of focused people to out-execute legacy corporations. I've decided this will work no matter what. The question is how far we can take it. That doesn't remove the fear that we might launch and fail to gain traction. We are going to market anyway. We'll figure out how to get there, and we'll deal with whatever gets in our way.

So I hope someone reads this. If you happen to find this page, thank you for stopping by. I hope you understand it's important to us.

Our ambition is extremely high. We don't do this to exit in a few years. I plan to retire here. That's 30 to 40 years left, so hell, if you come with us, you're stuck with me and Zander.

We are launching soon. We are working night and day. We are excited. We are scared. We are doing it anyway.