Otto for founders

You are the bottleneck, and the inbox knows it

Three hundred unread, and four of them matter: the customer about to churn, the investor waiting on an update, the candidate holding another offer, the contract that needed signing yesterday. The rest is noise wearing the same font.

Ask Otto what needs you today and it reads the mail you have not, then tells you in a few lines. That is the whole trick at the start. You are not trying to reach zero, you are trying to find the four.

From thread to done, without leaving the thread

Say it in plain words. "Reply to Acme, accept the terms, ask for the statement of work by Friday." "Find thirty minutes with the candidate on Thursday morning." "Nudge me if legal has not come back by Tuesday."

Otto drafts the reply in your voice, proposes the event on the connected calendar, and puts the follow-up in Google Tasks or Microsoft To Do for the account you selected. Then it stops and shows you a card: recipients, wording, scope. Approve it and it goes. Delegation you cannot check is not delegation, it is hope.

The parts of the week you keep forgetting

Snooze the thread you cannot deal with until Monday and it comes back unread on Monday. Ask to be reminded if nobody replies and you get the nudge instead of the vague guilt. A morning brief can land each day with what came in overnight and what is still open, so the day starts with a briefing rather than a scroll. It is on Free too, and Plus and Pro can send it to Telegram, Slack or Discord as well.

Where the newer Work and Focus controls are enabled, you can accept a source-linked commitment, see whether it is on you or someone else, and choose which newsletter bundles should interrupt you. Focus changes the Otto view and notification timing; it does not delay delivery to your provider or silently mark mail read.

If you run a work address and a personal one, or Gmail on one side and Microsoft 365 on the other, both connect to the same app and the selected account decides which calendar and which task list you are touching.

The board update and the hiring plan can live in Otto's notes. Write them with a cofounder in the same note, live, send a copy to an investor by email from your own mailbox, or publish a read-only link they can open without an account and turn it off when the round closes.

Quick on a bad morning, on whatever you are holding

The list is served from Otto’s up-to-date inbox list, so folders switch without a wait, and new mail is pushed in by Gmail and Outlook rather than polled, so it appears as it arrives. Triage runs off the keyboard: J and K to move, one key to archive, star or reply. The same workspace is on the web and on your phone for the twenty minutes between meetings.

Your mailbox remains with your provider. Otto keeps an inbox list with message details and can retain selected content when you save a chat, note, draft or prepared work. What Otto stores explains those records.

Start with one real morning

Free includes one connected Gmail or Outlook account, core mail, calendar and tasks, and an AI allowance. Run tomorrow morning through it before you think about a second account or a bigger tier.

See the assistant, calendar and scheduling and tasks. If the pile itself is the problem, read inbox overload for founders.