Letz is a productivity tool that will help you to be more disciplined. The chat-bot won a Best Technology Product award on Product Hunt. Its AI, Lucy, will connect with you on phone and desktop, to entertain and help you during the day.
Founder Nino Karas explains on The Next Web why Lucy is the digital, personal assistant you’ll love. Karas and Martin Anchevski, co-founded CodeWell, a software development company before they started Letz. In 2015 the team was part of Rockstart Web and Mobile batch.
What was the problem that other productivity tools couldn’t solve?
“We had some experience with productivity tools and noticed one remarkable trend. People want to be productive, but they fail because they lack self-discipline. So, if a productivity tool isn’t used enough and therefore won’t help the user be more productive, the user will still blame the tool for not helping them get their to-do-list done. We knew we had to overcome this issue, so we made Lucy – an artificial intelligence that will communicate with you throughout the day. She’s pro-active, funny and committed to make sure you’ll get done what you want.”
How does Lucy work?
“From the moment you wake up, Lucy has contact with you. She’ll remind you what you’re schedule is and asks you if you accomplished your tasks. Lucy for instance notices when it rains and will ask you if you don’t want to get an umbrella. She’ll learn from you and will get to know you, enabling her to give tailor made suggestions. What makes Lucy different from any other AI is that she doesn’t want to change your habits, but wants to use them to make you more productive. That helps us to overcome the lack of discipline of a user.”
So, what’s next?
“At this moment, the app is still free, since we want to focus on creating engagement. Letz has been download more than 30.000 times and is actively used by 8.000 users. Impressive: they share around 5 million messages and have created more than 120.000 tasks. We just announced our seed round and aim to collect 700-800.000 euro. We primarily focus on English speaking markets: the USA, UK, Canada and Australia. That’s why we consider moving to one of those countries. We aim to have a strong presence in the US by 2019 and want to expand to other non-English speaking markets from that moment. Since an AI-bot needs to understand you, language is key. It would be a shame if you and Lucy wouldn’t understand each other, so it takes some time to make our product fit for new markets.”
01
From port to startup fort: How Lars Crama is ‘Making it Happen’ in Rotterdam