One lesson from building JourneyLoop, three finds worth your time, under five minutes.
Hey,
Our Companion lives in Telegram. Coaches open an app that feels like the ones they use to text their friends and family, and that is where they meet the AI which works alongside them. People are often surprised it landed there.
🔧 Under the Hood
When we needed a place to put the Companion, the obvious move was to build an interface. A login, a dashboard, somewhere coaches go to check on things. We went the other way and put it in a messaging app.
Part of that was practical. WhatsApp is what most coaches already know, but it is a closed platform owned by Meta, and I did not want to build on that. Telegram is open and it sits on the phone they already carry. Nobody has to go to a website or learn a new surface. It feels like texting a friend.
But the deeper reason is about expectation, and that is the part I did not fully see until coaches started using it. A chat app sets a different clock than a dashboard does. You know this from ChatGPT: you type, and you expect an answer in seconds. When you text a coworker instead, you do not expect them to reply that instant, but you accept that they go off and do real work in the background. That is what the Companion is actually doing.
That one, small shift is where it’s at. A dashboard is something you operate. It is also, often, something you perform for. A lot of enterprise tools record coaching sessions and turn them into aggregated dashboards, and that creates a strange situation: a leader being coached knows it is going to surface somewhere, so they start showing up performatively instead of honestly. A chat thread carries none of that weight. You write to it the way you are.
Coaches are about relationships, and so this feels like a relationship to them rather than a tool that they're using.
What I learned as a builder: the medium sets the expectation before a single feature loads. We could have shipped the exact same model behind a dashboard and gotten a worse product, because coaches would have related to it as software to manage instead of a colleague to talk to. For work that is built entirely on relationships, that gap is the whole thing.
🔁 Worth a Loop
Three things from my week worth your time:
How AI agents replicate human memory. An interesting look at how engineers think about giving agents something like memory. It is exactly the problem behind a Companion that remembers a goal you mentioned three weeks ago.
Google's real-time audio translation. Google just released some genuinely impressive real-time audio translation. Coaching across languages is about to get a lot less lossy.
The US government stepped in on a model release. For the first time, the US government interfered with the release of an AI model on national-security grounds. Worth watching where that line gets drawn.
Reply and tell me: where has the wrong interface changed how you relate to a tool you use every day?
Marco
P.S. We get into design decisions like this on the Monday community calls. If you want an invite, just reply.