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

A humble beginning

My cofounder and I spent all evening trying to come up with a blog post. My cofounder went to bed, and two hours later I was still trying to learn how to blog. Somehow I'd drifted into writing the kind of post I hate.

Writing a blog post that sounds like the kind of company we started Mellovy to fight is ironic. I ripped everything out and started over from the manifesto, and this time I wrote down what's going on. We act like a big fancy company, and we don't know how to blog. We're flying blind.

Maybe that's what founding a company is, calculated falling. I know that doesn't make sense, but you get it. Zander, when you read this, I'm sorry I butchered your post. I hope you'll forgive me.

Hell, the clock says 02:58 and I need sleep. We've worked night and day to get here, and I can't wait for you to see what we've built. I'm scared you won't care, too. That's what life is, a bunch of fears. We do what we want, and we do it scared.

Somebody copying the idea doesn't worry us. What worries us is launching in an empty forest and hearing no sound. Putting something out and not knowing if you'll see it feels personal. Most of the companies we see are from the US. In this geopolitical environment, we hope being a European one helps you notice us.

We want to be vulnerable, and this post should show that. Maybe you'll use that against us or think a company shouldn't write like this. Then so be it, because that's not our problem. If being ourselves scares clients away, we didn't want them anyway.

We're scared and we don't know what we're doing, but that isn't why we're writing. We started Mellovy because the way work gets done pisses us off.

What pisses us off?

We keep hearing the same promise about AI, that if you become more productive your work gets easier. But productivity is a trap, because when you become more productive your reward is more work for the same paycheck. Maybe you're an overachiever. Doing more has never left me with less to do, and I bet you can say the same. 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, because we want to win when you win.

If Mellovy gives you more output and leaves you 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.

Say one person on your team wants something the company doesn't. You can talk to them, and most of the time that's enough. Then you give that person twenty agents, and all twenty go the wrong way with them. Add a second person like that, and now you have forty agents making 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. Cleaning up after them sucks, and I don't think you saved any time. AI didn't create these problems. It makes the ones that were already there easier to see.

We started Mellovy because of these problems, and to build the companies of the future. We're not building Mellovy for everyone. We're building for you if you're the kind of founder who would sooner rebuild than patch. The dot-com boom showed that you can't duct-tape the web on and call it done, and we think AI is the same.

We're our own first customer, and we run Mellovy on Mellovy. For now, the way we work is all we've got to show you, and we won't pretend we've got more. Vaporware would make a cleaner post, but we refuse to play that game.

If you want your boss to spell out how to do your job, you'll hate this, and that's on purpose. Let everyone else be ordinary. We don't want to run a company that has to fake certainty to keep the right people around.

That's not a small ambition. If you're one brilliant, ambitious person, we want you to get as much done as a much larger company. If you're a small team, we want you to outwork the old corporations. I've decided we'll make this work no matter what. I'm still scared we'll launch and you won't notice, but we're going to market anyway. We'll deal with whatever gets in our way.

I hope you're reading this. Thank you for stopping by, because this matters to us more than I can say.

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're about to launch, and we're excited, and we're scared, and we're doing this anyway.