u/cocktailMomos

I originally built Invoko for one very specific situation:

You’re about to jump into a client call or meeting and have that awful “wait where the hell did we leave this?” moment.

So the idea was simple: hit a hotkey, ask naturally, and it pulls context from whatever you already have open across Gmail, Slack, docs, tabs, etc.

That’s still the core use case.

But after a few hundred beta users, the interesting part has been seeing what people actually use it for day to day.

Biggest surprise by far: Gmail catch-up.

People are constantly doing stuff like:

“Catch me up from my Gmail this week”

“What happened in this thread while I was gone?”

“Did this client ever reply?”

I thought the screen/context part would be the main thing. Turns out a lot of people are just completely buried in inbox management.

Another one I didn’t expect: calendar workflows.

Someone’s staring at a meeting invite and just says:

“Confirm this and add it to my calendar.”

It grabs the title, timezone, date, creates the event, adds the Meet link, etc.

I honestly thought that feature was kinda niche when I built it. Apparently people really hate doing tiny repetitive admin stuff over and over.

The weirdest one is probably the end-of-day thing.

A bunch of users started doing:

“What did I work on today and where did I leave things?”

Never marketed that. Never even thought about it much. But multiple people said that’s the feature that made the app stick for them.

Big lesson for me so far:

you think you’re building one thing, but users usually reveal the real product after they start folding it into their actual workflow.

The AI part matters less than I expected honestly.

The stuff people care about is:

less tab chaos

less copy/paste nonsense

getting back into context faster after interruptions

not having to manually glue 5 apps together just to do one thing

Still early beta. Mac-only right now.

Curious what repetitive “ugh I have to do this AGAIN” workflow other people here wish AI tools would just handle already.

Every morning started the same way for me.

Open Slack.

Open Gmail.

Re-open yesterday’s doc.

Check calendar.

Try to remember where half my projects actually stood.

By the time I had enough context to start working, I already felt mentally cooked lol.

I kept trying to organize my way out of it with better notes, labels, dashboards, etc. Didn’t really solve the core problem that the useful context was scattered everywhere.

So I built a small Mac app for myself.

You press a hotkey, ask something like:

“what should I focus on from Slack right now?”

“catch me up from Gmail this week”

“where did I leave off on this project?”

…and it reads across whatever you already have open on your Mac and answers.

Works across Slack, Gmail, docs, browser tabs, screen content, etc.

Still early but surprisingly useful for interruption recovery + before-meeting catch-up.

Free beta is up at invoko.ai if anyone wants to try it.

Mostly curious whether other people here feel this problem too or if my workflow is just chaos.

Built this because I got tired of reconstructing context every time I switched tasks or came back from meetings.

The app is called Invoko. Mac only for now.

You press a hotkey, speak naturally, and it can either:

answer questions from what you already have open

help recover context across apps

or execute simple multi-step workflows

A few real examples:

“Catch me up from Slack before this meeting.”

“What changed in this client thread this week?”

“Take this table, make a Google Sheet, and open it.”

“Create a Notion page from this and send the link in Slack.”

Mainly looking for people who juggle a lot of tabs/projects/clients and are willing to use it in real workflows instead of just clicking around for 2 minutes.

Free open beta right now.

Apple Silicon + macOS Ventura or later.

Happy to test your product too if you drop it below.

Built this mostly because I got tired of bouncing between apps just to complete one simple thing.

Example:

You’re looking at a meeting invite in Gmail.

Normally you:

copy the date/time

open Calendar

create the event

paste the meeting link

double check timezone stuff

Or you write a project summary somewhere and then manually move it into Notion + Slack.

Or you come back to a project after 2 days away and spend 15 minutes reconstructing context before you can even start working again.

So I built Invoko.

You press a hotkey, talk naturally, and it reads what’s currently open on your screen across apps. Then it either answers your question or executes the workflow.

Stuff I use it for constantly:

“Catch me up from Slack before this meeting.”

“What changed in this client thread this week?”

“Turn this into a Notion page and send the link in Slack.”

“Add this meeting to my calendar.”

Big thing for me privacy-wise was making it work on keypress only. Nothing constantly recording/running in the background.

Mac only right now (Apple Silicon).

Free open beta: invoko.ai

Not even talking about “deep work” at this point. A weird amount of my day is literally just transferring context from one place to another.

Meeting happens → summarize it in Notion

Need visibility → paste parts into Slack

Decision gets made → update Jira

Client asks for recap → rewrite the same thing again in email

The information itself usually doesn’t change. Just the destination.

Feels like I spend a non-trivial amount of time acting as the integration layer between tools instead of actually thinking about the project.

Curious if this is just normal PM life now or if people here have found systems/workflows that reduce the constant copy-transfer-rewrite loop.

5 years solo recruiting and honestly the hardest part now isn’t sourcing or closing candidates. It’s keeping all the moving pieces in my head.

Every search has:

different client dynamics

candidates at different stages

random promises/follow-ups from old calls

stuff waiting on feedback

conversations spread across email, LinkedIn, ATS notes, Slack, etc.

At 4-5 searches I could mostly remember everything. At 15 active searches, half the battle is just reconstructing context before every call.

My ATS helps, but real life always moves faster than the notes stay updated.

Curious what systems other solo recruiters actually use here. Are you doing detailed notes? call summaries? daily refreshes? Or does everyone just become really good at scrambling before meetings?

For a long time I thought deals went cold because my pitch wasn’t good enough.

Lately I’m starting to think the bigger problem happens before the pitch even starts.

The calls where I get real traction are usually the ones where I’m fully current on that company’s actual situation:

what they said last time

what changed since we spoke

what they pushed back on

what internal priorities seemed to matter most

where the momentum or hesitation actually came from

The calls that stall are often the ones where I’m reconstructing context in real time while talking.

Even if the pitch itself is technically fine, people can tell when you’re operating from generic memory instead of current understanding. And once they feel that disconnect, the conversation gets noticeably weaker.

Right now I’m juggling around 30 active opportunities and staying genuinely current on all of them before every call is becoming its own operational problem.

CRMs help, but in practice they’re usually slightly behind reality unless you maintain them obsessively.

My post comply with the rules.

Curious how other founders/operators here handle this at scale.

About two years into freelancing now. Somewhere around 30 clients total over that time.

The actual delivery side has become manageable. Scoping, delivering, revising, communicating — that part eventually clicked.

The part that still feels messy is the relationship/context layer.

Every client has a long trail of conversations behind them:

things they casually mentioned wanting in the future

ideas I said I’d look into

feedback from old calls

half-finished threads that never became formal tasks

the general tone of the relationship at any given moment

When I only had a few active clients, I could keep most of this in my head. Once the number grew, that stopped working.

Now a client will message me referencing something from a conversation three weeks ago, and sometimes I immediately remember it… and sometimes I’m mentally reconstructing the context while replying.

Not the deliverables themselves. More the softer continuity that makes clients feel remembered and understood.

I’ve tried notes/CRMs/docs, but keeping them fully current starts becoming its own maintenance job.

Curious how other freelancers here handle this once client volume increases.

Do you have an actual system for staying current on relationship context, or is some amount of reconstruction just unavoidable?

I’ve gone through more productivity systems than I can count at this point. The pattern is almost always the same: I start strong, it feels meaningful for a week or two, then it quietly disappears.

Lately I’ve been noticing that the few habits that actually survived long term all have one thing in common: they don’t depend on me remembering to do them.

They’re attached to something I was already going to do anyway.

Checking my phone when I wake up? Still happens automatically years later because waking up is the trigger.

Writing down priorities before starting work? Usually dies within a couple weeks because it requires me to consciously initiate an extra step before I’m already in motion.

Weekly reviews are another example. I’ve started them probably ten different times. Every version felt useful. None lasted because there was never a natural trigger that made them happen automatically.

It’s making me think consistency might have less to do with motivation or discipline itself and more to do with whether the behavior is anchored to something already built into your day.

Curious what habits/systems other people here are still genuinely doing 6+ months later that they originally thought would fade. What made them stick?

I used to think context switching was mostly a discipline problem. Like if I were organized enough, I’d naturally remember where I left off between projects, conversations, and half-finished tasks.

Then I tracked it for a week. Every time I switched away from something, I logged how long it took to fully get back into it later. The amount of time lost honestly surprised me.

But the bigger realization wasn’t the time itself. It was noticing how often I avoided reopening threads/docs/history because reconstructing the context felt mentally expensive. So instead, I’d make smaller decisions with incomplete information just to keep moving.

I think a lot of founder/operator stress comes from this constant partial-context mode more than people realize. Especially when juggling customers, product work, hiring, meetings, and random interruptions all day.

Curious whether other people here have noticed the same thing once their workload became more fragmented. Do you have any system for quickly reconstructing context when switching back into something?

I kept running into the same problem during work: switching back to something after a few hours and realizing I had no idea what the latest context was anymore.

Usually it meant digging through Slack threads, docs, notes, and random tabs just to reconstruct what had already been decided.

So I started building a small Mac tool for myself. You press a hotkey, ask something like “what’s the current status here?” and it reads whatever’s currently on screen and gives a quick answer.

It works across Slack, email, docs, browser tabs, etc. One thing I was careful about is that it only reads when triggered manually. Nothing always running in the background.

Still early, but it’s been surprisingly useful for before-call prep and jumping back into interrupted work.

Mostly sharing because I’m curious whether this is a real pain point for other people too, or if I’ve just broken my own attention span from multitasking too much.

Been noticing a pattern with the AI tools I actually keep using. The ones I stick with are usually the ones where I intentionally activate them------ press a key, ask a question, get an answer.

The always-on tools that continuously collect context in the background somehow feel mentally heavier, even when they're useful.

I think part of it is productivity-related too. Active-trigger tools feel more like “use when needed,” while always-on tools can start feeling like another layer of noise or monitoring.

Curious if other people here notice this difference, or if it’s just psychological on my end.

Been thinking about why I kept using some AI tools and dropped others, and I think the pattern for me is the active trigger vs. always-on distinction.

The tools I actually stayed comfortable with are the ones where I intentionally activate them, press a key, ask a question, get an answer. The tools running continuously in the background collecting context all the time felt meaningfully harder to trust, even when the functionality was impressive.

I don't think it's just about privacy in the technical sense. Something about having a clear moment of consent each time changes how the interaction feels psychologically. Like the difference between """"helping when asked"""" versus """"constantly observing just in case.""""

Especially with AI systems becoming more embedded into daily workflows, I'm curious whether other women working in AI/product/design/research notice this too. Does the active-trigger model feel fundamentally different to you from the always-on model?

Wondering whether this maps to a real product design principle or if it's mostly perception and comfort level.

I've been building a tool for voice-based context recall, for a few months.

I keep thinking about just putting it into open beta with zero distribution strategy and seeing who actually finds it useful. The product works, the core loop feels solid, and honestly I'm getting more value from watching real usage than from trying to plan the perfect launch.

The thing I'm curious about is whether a product like this naturally finds the right people if the pain is real enough. My assumption is that the people constantly losing context between threads, meetings, tabs, and half-finished work will immediately understand the value without much explanation.

Part of me thinks shipping early to a small group of alpha/beta users is probably the fastest way to learn what the product actually is. Another part worries that """"just ship it"""" is sometimes an excuse to avoid figuring out distribution properly.

Has anyone here done the """"release first, observe behavior, iterate from there"""" approach with early users? What ended up surprising you the most?

For context. I've tried every note app and stopped using all of them. The problem isn't always the capture. It's the retrieval.

I keep leaving things in the middle and then spending real time figuring out where I was before I can get back to doing anything useful.

What I actually want: something that tells me where I left off when I ask. Not a dashboard. Not search. Just: ""here's what you were in the middle of, here's the last decision you made, here's what's still open.""

Does this exist? Or is the search step just assumed to be part of the workflow?

I want to set up something that runs on my Mac and handles things like context retrieval, catching up on threads, and basic task execution without me manually triggering a new chat each time.

There are a few options being discussed: OpenClaw, Invoko, n8n, and just using Claude with MCP. What is your experience with those?

my first startup was an AI productivity app called Karis, and it had all the features you'd expect. smart scheduling, focus modes, habit tracking, weekly reviews, all of it. except the fact that almost nobody actually needed it the way I built it. there was enough competition from Notion AI and Motion, and whenever I showed it to friends, they tried it once and forgot about it. we reached 94 users, but rarely any recurring sessions.

on top of that I spent too much building and not enough shipping early. I obsessed over edge cases in a product nobody had validated. took me about 8 months to admit the core wasn't working.

so here's what's changing. screw the broad productivity suite. I'm building in public. I'm not going to spend a dollar on ads until I have real retention, because genuine use is the only signal that matters.

I've already pivoted. I'm building Invoko now. it's a Mac app that does voice-based context recall. the idea came from watching myself spend 10 minutes after every meeting trying to find where I left off. the product is much narrower, which scared me at first. now I think narrow is the point.

trying to get a few people to test it to see if they actually use it daily.

lmk if you've pivoted off something that wasn't working and what that was like