Speaker unverified: belief

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…At this point it probably feels like a huge amount of money in funding. You don’t have any customers. Literally nothing. We had a bunch of junky code that I was writing and my co-founder was going around doing some marketing stuff and trying to generate press for a thing we hadn’t built yet. The idea we were working on was called Taskforce. The idea was you get all these tasks in your inbox, you get Ben and David from Acquired saying, hey Courtland, have you prepped for the podcast yet? I didn’t receive that email—but if you had, I can use Taskforce to convert it into a little to-do and it will be added to your to-do list in your inbox. Then when I work on that to-do if I had to-do day or I tick it off, you'll get an email that says hey, Courtland is this far along in the to-do or Courtland just completed it. We're supposed to be this viral thing that would take over the inbox and everybody would have it. It eventually did launch in YC. We got a decent number of users. By the end of YC, I think we had 100,000 users, but back in the day there was nothing. The social network had just come out a few months earlier, $1 million is cool. That was kind of the mantra and no one cared that your app had 100,000 users. That was meaningless. I'm also dying over here, because after Hacker Follow, my first app which was a task list that I launched for iOS 3 which is right around the same time period. If I remember right, Gmail Tasks was still this really terrible UI. You built the missing connectivity for Gmail tasks that would eventually become—I think they turned it into its own thing, but it was like constrained with an engine……

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