The Beginning: Why We're Building Consul
The Moment It Clicked
I've spent years in rooms with leaders. The pattern is always the same.
The bottleneck is never the product, the market, or the team. It's bandwidth. Every channel is on fire. The inbox is a graveyard. The calendar is a war they're losing.
I watched a friend—a startup founder, brilliant at what she does—spend an entire afternoon trying to schedule a single investor meeting. Back and forth emails. Checking three different calendars. Apologizing for the delay. By the time the meeting was booked, she'd lost two hours and most of her creative energy for the day.
This wasn't a one-time thing. Every leader I knew was drowning in the same overhead.
And the solution has always been the same: hire someone to help.
The Problem With Human Assistants
That someone costs $100,000 a year, takes 42 days to find, and leaves in 23 months. There are 3.9 million executives in America. Fewer than 300,000 have one.
The rest? They're left with productivity tools. More tabs, more notifications, more context-switching. The average professional now uses 9+ apps just to manage their work life. And somehow, we're all still losing 10+ hours a week to coordination.
Developers got Cursor. Everyone else got SaaS with chatbots.
That's when it clicked: people don't need another productivity tool. They need the coordination to just... happen.
What If You Had an Assistant?
Think about how executives with full-time assistants work. They don't schedule their own meetings. They don't track their own follow-ups. They don't spend mental energy on coordination—they spend it on the work that actually matters.
What if everyone could have that? Not by hiring someone, but through software that works like a person?
That's the vision we started building toward on July 17th, 2025.
The First Prototype
We called it Consul Pro. The idea was ambitious: build a complete command center for your work life. Calendar, email, contacts, AI assistant—all working together intelligently.
In those first weeks, we focused on three core capabilities:
Smart Calendar Management — Not just syncing your calendar, but understanding it. Multi-account support, intelligent scheduling, real-time conflict detection.
Relationship Intelligence — A CRM that actually helps you maintain relationships. Who have you been meaning to reconnect with? Who's waiting for a response? The system should know.
Natural Conversation — Talk to Consul like you'd talk to a human assistant. "Schedule lunch with Sarah next week" should just work.
Early Choices That Shaped Everything
From day one, we made decisions that would pay off later:
We built for speed. Every interaction needed to feel instant. When you click something, it should respond in milliseconds, not seconds. We obsessed over this from the first commit.
We built for reliability. AI that works 80% of the time is actually useless—it's the 20% failures that destroy trust. We invested heavily in error handling and fallback systems.
We built for security. People were going to trust us with their calendars, emails, and contacts. We couldn't cut corners on protecting that data.
The First Signs of Life
By August, we had a working AI assistant. It was rough—the responses were sometimes clunky, the scheduling had edge cases we hadn't considered, the UI needed polish. But it worked.
You could tell Consul to "schedule a call with John tomorrow afternoon" and it would check your availability, find a time that worked, and create the event. It felt like magic the first time it worked.
More importantly, the people who tried it immediately understood the vision. Not "this is a cool demo" but "I need this in my life."
What We Were Learning
Those first months taught us lessons we carry to this day:
Speed is trust. When something responds instantly, you trust it. When it takes 3 seconds, you wonder if it's broken. We cut our calendar loading time by 85% in those early weeks, and it changed how people felt about the entire product.
AI needs guardrails. The model could hallucinate times that didn't exist or schedule meetings during conflicts. We learned that reliable AI is about knowing what the model shouldn't do as much as what it should.
Simple beats clever. Our early UI had all kinds of fancy features. Users ignored most of them. They just wanted the basics to work perfectly.
The Road Ahead
By the end of summer 2025, we had something real. A prototype that worked, a vision that resonated, and a small group of early users who were genuinely excited.
But we were also starting to see a pattern in the feedback—something that would ultimately change our entire approach. That's a story for the next update.
Building Consul is a journey we're sharing publicly. If you want to follow along—or be one of the first to try it—join our waitlist.