@mignano
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We’ve pivoted Oboe. The first version, which we spent the past two years building, didn’t work. No excuses. Here’s the full story, culminating in what comes next: an all-new Oboe, available today.
We launched Oboe with a mission to make humanity smarter. That mission is core to who we are, and it hasn’t changed. The first way we thought to achieve it was by leveraging frontier models to offer everyone personalized tutoring.
But through many iterations over the past two years, it became clear that we built the wrong product. First, we’d made strategic decisions that left us undifferentiated in the age of LLMs. Second, by focusing on utility above all else, there was little organic incentive for people to return to the platform. And most importantly, no matter how great our product was, not many people were motivated to actively learn every day.
Despite our best efforts to serve everyone on the planet, we landed on a small, loyal user base that loved a product which wasn’t growing fast enough.
So we took a step back: How else could we serve everyone on the planet and still achieve our mission?
We decided instead to focus on a motivation everyone has: to have fun. Every day, billions of people entertain themselves on their mobile devices, filling countless minutes with mindless scrolling and brainrot that doesn’t make us smarter. In many cases, it actually makes us stupider.
What if we could replace scrolling that makes us stupider with scrolling that is both fun and makes us smarter? That’s the new Oboe.
It’s a fully personalized feed of dynamically generated, interactive, anti-brainrot challenges. Every scroll is designed specifically for you, to help you get smarter in a few minutes every single day.
We’ve been blown away by usage from our thousands of beta users. The differences in engagement and retention between this and the original version are stark. The product is working. It’s already clear that this new direction taps into a universal need that none of our previous iterations did.
For all of those people out there like me who feel like doomscrolling wastes their precious time, who enjoy feeling fulfilled, and who wish there was a better alternative: this one’s for you.
We can’t wait to see what you think.View quoted post on X
Granola now does voice typing. Unlimited words, for free.
Granola already writes your meeting notes. Now it can do the typing for you, in any app.View quoted post on X
