Why We Built Micro

I was paying for Gmail, HubSpot, Notion, Linear, Google Calendar, Superhuman, Zoom, and ChatGPT. Eight subscriptions. Somewhere around $400/month.

I still spent half my day copying information between them.

Here's what that actually looks like. A VC emails me. I open HubSpot to check our last interaction. Then Notion to find the doc I shared. Then Linear to see if the feature they asked about shipped. Three tabs, three searches, two minutes gone.

Multiply that by every person I talk to, every day.

This is the life of every founder I know. And the tools aren't bad individually. Gmail is fine. HubSpot works. The problem is what happens between them. That's where everything falls apart.

The gap between tools is where context dies

After a meeting with an investor, I'd take notes in Notion. Follow-up tasks went into Linear. The email thread lived in Gmail. The contact record sat in HubSpot.

Four tools, one conversation, zero connection between any of them.

Two weeks later when that investor emails back, I'd have to reconstruct what happened. What did we talk about? What did I promise to send? Is there an open task? The information existed, it was just scattered across four apps that don't talk to each other.

I kept thinking there had to be a better way. Not a better CRM. Not a better email client. Something that just knew the whole picture.

What if everything lived in one place

That question sat with me for a long time. I'm a cognitive scientist by training (ex-Google, worked on how people process information). The fragmentation problem felt personal.

The human brain doesn't organize information by app. It organizes by context: people, projects, timelines. Our tools should work the same way.

So we started building Micro.

Micro is email, CRM, meetings, tasks, documents, and AI in one app. Not the way Notion tries to be everything with databases. Not the way HubSpot bolts features onto a CRM. We built it on a single data model where every email, contact, company, meeting, task, and document lives in one graph.

When an email comes in, Micro already knows who sent it, what deals they're connected to, what meetings you've had, what tasks are open. When a meeting ends, the notes link to the right contact automatically. When you ask the AI a question about a person or company, it has the full history.

No tab switching. No searching three apps. One place.

The knowledge graph underneath

Most tools store data in flat tables. Contacts in one table, emails in another, tasks in a third. Disconnected by design.

Micro stores everything as objects in a graph. A contact connects to their emails, which connect to threads, which connect to deals, which connect to tasks. Every relationship is a first-class link you can traverse.

When you're looking at a contact, you see their full timeline: emails, meetings, tasks, notes, deals, LinkedIn messages. Not because we built a special "contact timeline" feature. Because the graph already has those connections.

Turns out this matters a lot for AI. When ChatGPT or Claude answers a question, the quality depends entirely on what context you give it. Most tools can only give the model a tiny slice because their data is siloed.

Micro's AI has access to the entire graph. Ask it "what's the status with Acme Corp?" and it pulls from emails, meeting notes, CRM records, and tasks to give you a real answer. Not a hallucinated one.

Why now

Two things changed.

First, AI got good enough. Language models can read emails, summarize meetings, triage your inbox, draft responses, connect dots between conversations. But they need context. An AI that only sees your email is limited. An AI that sees your email, CRM, calendar, and tasks together is something else entirely.

We own the full context. So our AI is actually useful.

Second, founders got tired of tool sprawl. The average startup founder pays for 8+ SaaS subscriptions and still spends hours each week manually moving information between them. Zapier helped, but duct-taping tools together isn't the same as having a product that was designed as one thing.

There's real demand for consolidation. But only if the consolidated product is genuinely good at each thing it does.

That's the bar.

Who this is for

Right now, Micro is for early-stage startup founders and investors. People who wear twelve hats and can't afford to spend their day managing tools instead of doing actual work.

If you're a founder who handles your own sales, manages investor relationships, runs meetings, tracks tasks, and writes docs, you're exactly who we built this for. Same if you're an investor who manages hundreds of founder relationships and needs to remember what you talked about six months ago.

We'll expand beyond that. But we're starting narrow on purpose. Build something that's perfect for a small group, then widen. Not the other way around.

What we're shipping

We ship every week. The product right now:

• Email: full email client with AI triage, drafting, and smart categorization
• CRM: contact and company management with custom properties and pipeline views
• Meetings: calendar integration with AI notes that auto-link to contacts
• Tasks: list views, kanban boards, email-to-task conversion
• Documents: markdown docs that live alongside everything else
• AI assistant: chat with full context across all your data
• LinkedIn: messaging and contact sync, in the same inbox

Everything is built on the same object-property system, so it all connects naturally. A task can reference a contact. A meeting note links to a deal. An email thread shows related tasks.

It just works the way your brain expects it to.

Try it

If you're a startup founder or investor and this resonates, try Micro. We're in early access and building fast based on user feedback.

Tell us what's working, what's broken, and what you wish existed. Find me on X or check out the blog.

We also just released 200 free AI agent skills for the four things founders and investors do most: fundraising, sales, hiring, and investing.