I built a custom Slack inbox. It was easier than you’d think. | Yash Tekriwal (Clay)

I truly wake up to maybe 100 to 150 new Slack notifications, not even just like, oh, these are unread channels. Truly, someone has tagged me. 60 to 80% are more in the FYI category. So my hundred to 150 that's giving me anxiety is actually more like 30 to 40 that I really need to be on top of. You can use AI to do a task for you, like categorize things, summarize things, or you can use AI just to build a tool that would have been much harder to build before with very straightforward APIs and structured data. Exactly. Think about like a Kanban-style board. You have in red on the left, action required, urgent, Yash needs to get back to it. In the middle, we've got a yellow need-to-read column. And then on the right, in green, much more easy, I have a bunch of FYIs. I can just go ahead and click this archive all button. They'll disappear from the dash. And then those notifications will also disappear on my Slack. Oh, that's magic. And this is such a better way to just get through your queue. My dream is for someone else to watch this video and say, I want to build that app on top of Slack, and then I can go pay that person $15 a month for this app to be maintained and used. And then I can file bug reports with them instead of having to fix it myself because I would happily pay that. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Yash Tuckral, head of education at Clay. And he is a hyper-optimizer, showing us how he uses perplexity computer to work through the hundreds of Slack messages he gets every day. We're also going to debate, is SaaS really dead? Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Guru, the AI layer of truth for your company's knowledge. Here's the problem. Your AI is only as good as the information you feed it. Most companies are getting confident but wrong answers from AI because their underlying knowledge is outdated, incomplete, or just plain incorrect. Bad information doesn't just slow you down. It costs you money and puts you at risk. Guru solves this by adding a verification layer between your company's knowledge and AI tools. Instead of just hoping your AI gets it right, Guru automatically scores content for accuracy, flags outdated information, and ensures your team gets trustworthy answers every time. It works with the tools you already use, so you don't have to change how you work. Thousands of companies trust Guru to keep their AI accurate and compliant. Ready to stop playing Russian roulette with your company's knowledge? Visit getguru.com to learn more. Welcome to How I AI. Yash, I'm so excited. We've been trying to make this happen for months. And we've been trying to make it happen over Slack for months. And what I love about that is what we're going to start this episode off with is how you get yourself unburied from the deluge of Slack messages and emails and work you have to do on a daily basis. Yeah, so I wish I could say I had built this back when we were organizing it, but maybe that gives you a little bit more leeway for understanding me losing Slack threads all the time. For context, you can see my Slack screen right here. Right now, I cleared this truly two hours ago and I already have like another 40 plus messages of which you can see like eight or more are DMs. And it's just going to keep going up, right? Now, I truly wake up to maybe 100 to 150 new Slack notifications. Not even just like, oh, these are unread channels. Truly, someone has tagged me. It's a DM, they've tagged me. It's a group DM or something else, which all feel very important. But not all notifications are created equal in Slack. For example, I care much more about getting back to you on scheduling our podcast recording than I do about my colleague's really fun comment on their dog that they posted a photo of in the fun dog channel. But I get an equal notification for both. And so what I sort of started doing with Perplexity Computer when it came out about a month ago is thinking, if I could truly just design any software or like paradigm myself, what would I do, how, and why? And so Perplexity Computer is actually not exactly how we initially solved the Slack problem. We'll come back to that in just a second. But I think the framework is also what matters most is I needed to be able to envision what does a better world look like instead of just asking Claude or Perplexity or OpenClaw, make my Slack easier. And so that better world that I thought of is if not all notifications are created equal, then what if I could better categorize my notifications by DMs versus group DMs versus threads versus group at mentions? Because I treat all of those differently. I try to clear my DMs ASAP because I tell everyone, if I'm not responding within 24 hours, DM me. So that urgency needs to be there. But then on top of that, of course, people are DMing me about random things, like who wants to go dancing this weekend? Who wants to go to dinner for hot pot this week and all sorts of other fun things. So even within each of those four categories, the DMs, the groups, the threads, the at mentions, I also want to sub-categorize by what requires real action from me, what do I need to read but maybe doesn't need a response from me, and what are more of the like FYI for your information notifications. And as you might guess, a little precursor that I'll give you is like 60 to 80% of my notifications every day are more in the FYI category. So my 100 to 150 that's giving me anxiety is actually more like 30 to 40 that I really need to be on top of. And that makes things a lot easier, but I need to build a system to get there. So, if I could repeat your problem back to you, you're very important at work and also super fun and popular. And this is just causing you tons of at mentions. And you're going to show us how you use Perplexity Computer, although I think you started with something else to kind of solve this problem and prototype your way out of it. Exactly. I think the other like general framework I'll give here is that I do think something that I coach a lot of people on my team about as well is when to use AI purely, like an MCP even, versus when to use AI to build something deterministic, like code or an API call. And so, for example, here in Slack, there's enough API endpoints available that we could get into that I know I should be able to build the information organization system just using code. And so actually I did that via my little, we can do a detour here, Jarvis, my OpenClaw. Let's see if I can even find my, here we go, thread. It's a very long thread that we can come into all the way up on Slack. I'm not going to go through and do all of this, but you can sort of see in here a quick glance. It's building the digest for me, right? So it's looking at, okay, what is the timestamp? What do I want to mark? For example, Slack has a whole info chart that we could find online and then put in this if we wanted to on how they've built their notification system. It's very intentional. Whether or not it's unread or gives you a number or how many numbers it gives you is all dependent on the stream in which it comes in. And so for me to actually pull, not every single new message in my Slack, because that would be overwhelming, but to only pull the ones that I care about with only the context that I care about requires a little bit of just systems thinking. I need to look at what was the last time I looked at the message. Did I look at only the most recent message or have I looked at another message in the thread before, because then I don't need to see the whole thing. I just need to see only the most recent messages. So all of this data is tracked in Slack via these timestamps. And you can see me going back and forth with Jarvis here for a long, long time on what is unread, what is not, how do I look at these channels? And so this back and forth, which truly goes on for like thousands of messages, so we won't do all of it, took me like a full day to really prototype and build and understand to get to a point where to be fair, now those hundred plus notifications come in to this Jarvis Digest channel in Slack. It does group it into direct at mentions. You've got those three sub buckets. Then we've got DMs. Then we've got group mentions. And then we've got threads. So those are the four overall buckets. And then within each of those buckets, I could now, and this is what I did for a week, just command click into each of these, open up a new thread, decide what I need to respond, come in, respond, then go back. Just to kind of narrate for people that are maybe not watching the YouTube, what we're seeing here. You basically said, look, I get this all purpose inbox from Slack with notifications and unread. I get hundreds of them of which maybe two dozen are actually interesting to me. I have a pretty clear sense of how I want those organized and prioritized at my own workflow. I'm going to spin up OpenClaw as a coding agent in Discord. I think I spotted Discord. And why Discord real quick? So my one reason for Discord, I started on Telegram with OpenClaw, like I Natively connected to all these different tools. I don't have to go give it in the way that I give OpenClaw, right? Like access to different skills to be able to go do things in software. It can just go do it and ask me for logins on my own. And that native connection to all those tools helps me be able to do things much more fluidly at the speed of thought because everything is being recorded everywhere. So like a really easy example that I actually deleted because it was an accident, but I can just talk through real quick, is I also use Notion AI to record all of my meeting notes. Perplexity computer is connected to Notion AI. And so what I am always doing in all of my meetings is saying, hey, here's a bunch of follow-up things that we should probably do. Let's make sure we get them all done. I try and put all of those most important ones in my task management. But because that transcription exists, it's in Notion and computer has access to Notion, I can then also go into computer and say, look through all of my meeting transcripts from the end of the day today. Gather the list of action items. Categorize the ones that you think are important. Throw them into my Asana if they're longer-term action items. And actually, for anything that's just a message or a notification or an email, draft me the response. Can you show us what connectors you're using regularly just so people can have a sense of what you're talking about? Oh, you're using like all of them. So many. I mean, not even close to all of them, right? But for everyone listening, I've got the bare basics. Google Drive, Gmail with calendar, Notion, Asana, Slack, forms, tasks, Typeform, Zoom, Spotify, which I haven't really used, but I thought it would be fun, you know? Airtable, Google Slides. And then there are tons of other ones I'm not using, like Linear, Supabase. I've looked at trying to use maybe like Snowflake more, Datadog more. But I'm focusing really just on what am I actually getting value out of today instead of chasing, I have what I would call shiny object syndrome. So one day, I'll maybe get back to all the shiny objects. But for now, this is what provides the lion's share of the value back to me. Great. And then just to kind of like loop the thread back to what we were originally talking about. So you showed us Perplexity Computer. You really like it. Multi-model, multi-threaded, concurrency, nice to use, lots of connectors. And then you flashed to the beginning, but let's just show what you built for that Slack management tool because I think it's really cool. Yeah. So I'll do my best to visually describe this for those not watching. You can imagine a dashboard UI. It looks sort of like any task management tool you've had before. Think about like a Kanban style board. But instead of multiple cards for all the sections of tasks that you've got, you've just got three main ones. You have in red on the left, action required, urgent, Yash needs to get back to it. In the middle, we've got a yellow, need to read column. I should make sure that I'm understanding what's going on here, but I probably don't need to respond. And then on the right in green, much more easy. I have a bunch of FYIs. Hey, here's what dinner is. Here's where the address is. Here's what someone is doing for the launch that we just planned. And so then there's a bunch of other smaller dials that I've customized on here so I can group this, like we were talking about earlier, by order of operations. Do I want to go through my DMs first? Do I want to go through my group mentions first? I have a sidebar on the left that I can categorize those by. And then the best thing about this dashboard for me is that I use this all the time, the FYI notifications on the right. I can just go ahead and click this archive all button. They'll disappear from the dash. And then those notifications will also disappear on my Slack. Ah, that's magic. Because I know you can, in Slack, I think you can do like mark all as read, but you can't be like, mark my DMs as read or mark FYI as read or like multi-select. And so you're sitting there with either like a hundred unread messages or zero. There's nowhere in between. And this is such a better way to just get through, get through your queue. And one thing I have to say was like, there's this incessant debate of like, is SaaS dead? Is this like SaaS apocalypse happening? Like, who's going to build the new Slack that's better? Is Slack the new Slack? And what I love about this moment is like, Slack is still great. Like it's, it's so good. It's great for sending messages. I don't know if it's great for reading messages, but it's great for sending messages. And you can, with the very low effort, say my company is using Slack. We're happy with it generally nine out of 10. And to get it to 10 out of 10, I'm just going to build the thing that works with my brain. And it doesn't even have to be about a deficiency of the existing software. It just has to be, you know, closing the gap between your ideal workflow as an individual and what you get out of SaaS. And it's just, I just think it's such an interesting model as we think about like, what are these, what are these productivity tools going to become? What are these collaboration tools going to become? Is there like, you know, Slack core and then Slack custom, right? And you just build on top of it. I, yeah, I so agree. I would actually say maybe my very hot take here. I think we will see an explosion in software being created and used because of all these tools. I don't think the average person or even the proficient person is going to start custom by building and coding all these tools. I don't think the intelligence of AI, at least the way we're seeing it ramped currently is getting to a point where my mom could go in and say, make Slack easy. And then it builds this. I think instead what will happen is you sort of, like you were saying, optimize these tools. And I'll be so honest. If someone else, my dream is for someone else to like watch this video, look at this and say, I want to build that app on top of Slack. And then I can go pay that person $15 a month for this app to be maintained and used. And then I can file bug reports with them instead of having to fix it myself because I would happily pay that. I agree. And it's, I, what I think is so funny is I am like a B2B girl. I've done product for a long time. There has always been this long tail queue of like customer requests being like, I would really just love it if that button in the bottom left of this page did this very niche thing for my specific vertical. Like that would be great. When's it on the roadmap? And the answer is a reasonable SaaS PM is like, never. And now you can kind of like replace this concept with, okay, point a forward deployed engineer at that and say like, we're never going to build that for you. That's a you problem, babe. But let me show you how you can get that on your own. And then again, yes, I agree with you. I think kind of like two things are going to happen. One, just so many more creative opportunities for software to be built, just as you said. Like somebody maybe will watch this and be like, yes, I'm going to build like Slack digest as a product. The second thing is like, there is probably like TAM of this big for that product. And because the cost of building it is so low, who cares? Like somebody could go turn it into a 10K a month, like project or a 20K a month, a project. Doesn't have to be venture scale. Doesn't have to like hit a billion dollars. Doesn't have to have the million users and still like be useful. And I feel like there's so much useful software that we could have because it's been so expensive to build and not worth people's time. And I am just, I'm with you. Like let's go do more. Agreed. Yeah. And then, you know, and then Slack can do the thing where they just go like this and like scoop them up. Exactly. Slack can then acquire all those people. I think you'll see a Cambrian explosion of like businesses that wouldn't have existed without venture funding or that people wouldn't have wanted to build that can make their own money or get acquired by larger companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, I mean, that's basically what, what I'm, I'm doing right now. So it's like, I'm, I'm living it. I love this. This is genius. People take this idea. Think about the most, I, I often tell people to build their anti-to-do list and then spend an hour a day burning down that list, which is like, I never, ever, ever want to go through my Slack on reds again in an unprioritized way. That's going to be on my anti-to-do list. So I'm going to spend an hour a day trying to figure out how to like dig myself out of that problem. Another one like I have is I never, ever, ever want to delete spam out of my email by hand. Like I've, I so often have to go through and like, click the check boxes and delete stuff. I never want. So like, how do I solve that problem? I never, ever, ever want to like manually, Our design team did a great job. Shout out to all of them on helping get this. Yeah, if I had made it, I did make it in the past. No one liked it, right? But there's a lot of information here and it's not really persona based or built. And as we as a company have scaled and are now scaling into further segmentations of different industries and audiences and who we sell to based on the features that we've built, it makes more sense to say, if you're in rev ops coming to the Clay website for university, where do you start? Because not all things, similar to my Slack notification issue, are created equal for you based on the profession you're coming into on the website. That's a major design system overhaul to take on top of this website and it takes a lot of thinking. None of us on the Education team are designers. I went into Figma Make, no shade to Figma Make, to try and rebuild it, but the problem is that I had to like redescribe everything to Figma Make in order to even get it to look accurate to what we already had for designs on the university. So it's not able to ingest the sort of like visual context layer that I have. What was really cool about what my teammate shout out, Chris Ming, did here is he went in and said, oh, perplexity computer can access it in the browser. It has all the different models, so it should also be able to visually recognize and then understand what I'm prompting back and forth. So he took an hour just chatting back and forth with computer. It doesn't look as pretty for those not watching, but it's functionally much closer to what we're trying to envision. Okay, now if I'm logged out, I can see all these different persona based journeys. I've got STR, BDR, rev ops, marketing ops, GTM engineer, and it even went ahead and built in this top right corner. What does it look like once you're logged in? So now, Sarah Chen, random name, not a real person, how many courses have you completed? What are the next courses for you based on, you can see your persona on the top right, being in rev ops? Let's look at what workshops you should go to. Let's look at what the cohorts are. and all of this helps our design team then better quickly understand what we're looking for. Because the other thing that I get frustrated with all the time is the like gap or the chasm in communication between design and any other stakeholders because they know what they need to do, but they don't have all the context that we have. And so being able to build a visual bridge between those two is incredibly valuable. I love it. Okay, so you're using it. You're getting your team to use it. It's not just for personal productivity. You can use it to prototype, pull in existing sites, really understand the context of them, and then build something that you can use to communicate to your cross-functional partners to get work just done better and faster. Exactly. And I'm going to give you a compliment. I see a lot of B2B websites. Clay, beautiful. Top, top 5%. I will definitely pass it on to the team. It's gorgeous. If you have not seen it, go check it out. And if you have watched my, I think it was like my Opus 46 versus GPT-5 three design head-to-head episode. If you watch closely, I redesigned the ChatPRD website and I say, I love the Clay website. Use that as inspiration. So, excellent work there. Okay, so you are a hyper-optimizer. Any other use cases you want to show for us before we get to our lightning round? No, let's just go for it. Let's do the lightning round. So, we have seen a lot of personal productivity work here, but you said that like 70, this is how I remember it. So, you know, we're going to, it's, it's God's truth. Like 70% of what people are asking you to do is go get hot pot and like hang out on the weekend. You're just a very fun, fun, fun person. So, are there any fun, you know, now that you've dug yourself out of Slack and email and your digest and all your work's being prototyped by your team, what are your fun use cases of AI? I think my preface to this is that I don't think I'm as fun as everyone else is with AI, but for whatever reason, like I treat AI truly as like a work tool. I have friends who are like in, they call ChatGPT chat, you know, they're having like a personal conversation. They're sending text messages back and forth and then sending screenshots of Chat's response to the text messages to me being like, look at how good it is. And for some reason, that's where I draw the line of like, I don't, I don't need a chat therapist. And also half of the time I'm pointing out to my friends that I would disagree with what Chat is saying. I think it's just there to support you. And I am here to tell you that that's not the right support. So, that's one thing I'll put aside. The other thing that I'll say I probably use it for the most in terms of like personal fun in my life is brainstorming and research. So, I love games. I love board games. I love activities. I love sports. Me and my friends host like a winter and a summer Olympics every year. We're now doing a spring and a fall. And it's typically a medley of a bunch of random activities. We'll do like apple bobbing, who can pull out all the napkins out of a box the fastest. Trivia is really fun. And we'll do, like one of my favorite that I stole from a friend was a list of 10 things. You just have to guess, was it a sword, a fish, or soup? And shockingly, no one scored above a 40% on that round. So, we love doing these types of activities that if I had infinite time, I would just spend all of my brainpower thinking about how to make this more and more fun. But most of the time I have an inkling of the things that I want to do. So, for example, this last winter Olympics that we held with all of my friends, I knew we wanted to have like two or three ironic throwbacks to college in terms of drinking games. We wanted to have two or three more fun conversational games and maybe two or three like actual games. So, I had a long brainstorming session with Jarvis about what are all the activities that we've done before? What are the themes on them? How should we actually think about vamping new activities? And almost never is it actually exactly what I want, but it gets me in the thought process of, oh, that is pretty much close to what I want. Let me make the final modifications myself. And then it's also really good for like the ops actually of organizing all that. We had 20 people come. So, now then, we wanted to be really intentional about matching people in teams. I put everyone in pairs, but I wanted you to interact with more than just your pair throughout the day. So then for each of the games that were four V4, we were rotating which pairs were with other pairs to come form mega pairs to then compete in a game so that you got exposure to like everyone else throughout the day. And so that I thought was really, really fun. And I use that all the time. I actually bought 10 new board games because I found them via Claude yesterday. And I was like, these look fun. So I think that's so fun. And you are not the only board game gaming person that we've had on the podcast. We actually had an entire episode about how two friends started a board game cafe in the East Bay using ChatGPT and all sorts of stuff. So nerds be using AI to play board games. This is what happens when you give nerds AI. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I do like though is to be like, to throw big social events. I love the idea of putting more structure around like how people meet each other and what they do and how to make it fun. I also love a group activity. I recently ran a month long March Sadness 64 song emo bracket where we decided what was the saddest emo song over all of, and I use like, I had like this vibe coded app. It was like a nightmare to run before. It was so fun to run. We had like over a hundred people in it. And so I do think it is like a fun, kind of like jumping off point. It's never where you wanna end up. But it gives you enough ideas that you'd be like, oh, I can pluck a little from that and a little from this and then get your friends together. So I love that. Okay. My last question, which I ask everybody. You seem like such a positive person. You seem like very proactive, very capable with AI, but you know, you use OpenClaw. Occasionally, like it's real dumb. What do you do when AI is not giving you what you want? What is your prompting strategy? How do you right the ship? I'll give you a very nuanced answer. I think there's three things, right? So thing number one is with OpenClaw in particular, it's even just recognizing that some skills maybe shouldn't be MCP skills. Case in point, my calendar. OpenClaw is really bad at dates. And I don't know why. It's like cannot tell what today is. It cannot tell that I'm like talking in 2026 and I therefore am planning a trip for 2026. Why would I plan a trip for 2025? That makes no sense. But where like I can build in a cron job that basically then says