Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | vedhsaka's commentslogin

April | https://www.tryapril.com | San Francisco /Gurgaon, India | ONSITE | Full-time

  Roles:
  1. Head of Growth (SF)
  2. Senior Software Engineer (Gurgaon, India)
We're building voice-first AI executive assistants for email and calendar management—think having a real assistant who actually gets things done. Backed by Y Combinator and other investors, we're at an extremely early stage and moving fast to hire our growth lead and early engineering team.

Head of Growth - Own the 0→100K user journey. Build content-led growth across LinkedIn/X/TikTok, run viral B2C experiments, and craft our brand voice. We need a proven track record of growing consumer products, content creation chops, and unreasonable excitement about retention curves. Extremely competitive salary + equity + user milestone bonuses.

Senior Software Engineer - Build the core backend for our AI assistant. 2-6 years of experience, TypeScript/Python, with consumer product background preferred. Work directly with founders on architecture decisions. Must work from the office. Competitive salary + early equity + quarterly performance hikes.

If you're interested, send your profile to [email protected]


You can - we have seen cases where people have deleted 1600 emails in one voice session. But as the pagination happens - it will be in batches, read/delete everything. We have to limit gmail's rate limits


What does that user experience look like? Could I say "move every unread unimportant email to a folder"? How would I do this work in batches?


Personally I won't do that as LLM's way of judging an unimportant email vs my judgement is different - we are still working on evolving that but again email is so different for different people that it will need a lot of learning.

But you can say remove all the emails which have unsubscribe text and it will do that in the batch of 20-100 (based on the app's rate limit at that time)


That happens now - before Send/Delete it will ask for confirmation.


Oh nice. Does it read you the text of the draft? Didn’t think I saw that in the demo, but maybe I missed it.


Yeah, It does. We mentioned only few of the things in the demo or else it would have been very long. Apart from hard delete, create /edit labels - all operations can be done through April.

Create/edit/delete draft are very common use cases as people would like to read before sending.


Not as of now.


That would be supercool - but not the focus point right now. Though I totally see myself using it.


Sorry for the bad experience. It is because of the sudden traffic. Looking at it.


Yes Yes! The MCP hackathon was our way in. Thank you, really appreciate the support.


I think the car dent story originally came from - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008239. As I clarified there - the dent happened before the April demo, during hackathon stress while taking out the car from parking.

But totally valid criticism about cognitive load - better example could be dog walking, cooking or screen free time.


It should really be made clearer in your post that that the crash was not from speaking with April, as it's a bit unclear. Cool product, good luck!


Valid concern - April does not write emails for you unless you specifically ask for it. Users usually dictate what they want to reply.

But do you think a 'safe mode' - where April does only non destructive operation like read/summarize/draft/move emails to a folder would help you build trust?

It's in our pipeline - we can prioritize it to mitigate that fear.


I started building basically April last week. I have a "safety" toggle in my app. If it's on, there's a "Review Actions" tab that any write or destructive actions go to. Then when I'm done dictating/commuting/whatever, I open the Review tab and go through the actions (add this calendar event, send this text message, reply to this email, etc) one by one - it sort of works like a checklist.

Feel free to take the idea, if it's helpful. No credit/rights necessary. Y'all are much farther along than I am and if you come out with an Android app I'll probably end up a customer!


> April does not write emails for you unless you specifically ask for it.

What if it thinks you asked for it?


Feels pretty easy to mitigate against. If a user deselects "allow email sending", then you can just remove that as a possible tool-call so it becomes impossible.


Yes, a safe mode would be great. I think it's a "nice to have" for a lot of early adopter (type of people who read HN), but it will be a "must have" more corporate types (a much bigger market).


Absolutely, having the AI agent write out a draft and leave it there, or better yet grant it read-only access to my email and have it draft email responses and store it somewhere else where I can retrieve it would be fantastic.

AI is still not at the point where I am comfortable letting it run free with my email, but a draft that I can read over and make changes to before sending it out is a game changer.


Its the most frightening naive reply i could imagine, if you can ask for it, it can hallucinate you asking for it or it can get prompt injected you asking for it. for voice only agents without UI approval process the only way is to have a separate clean room permission agent that does only get absolute safe context not even aggregate email titles. also for emails its impossible to design a safe agent that does any sort write action after reading anything in a mailbox because the mailbox is by definition tainted third party data and personal sensitive at the same time. even moving to a folder without can be used for attacks by hiding password reset notification mails etc.


Safe mode is absolutely necessary. I'd never let an LLM do things for me. They repeatedly prove that they categorically can't be jailed or trusted.


> April does not write emails for you unless you specifically ask for it.

> But do you think a 'safe mode' - where April does only non destructive operation like read/summarize/draft/move emails to a folder would help you build trust?

> It's in our pipeline

Wat


Means April will not send emails even if you dictate the email and ask it to send it. In safe mode, it will not have access to tool calls which are related to send email, move to trash.


> April does not write emails for you unless you specifically ask for it. Users usually dictate what they want to reply.

> Send replies that I dictate (it handles the formatting and tone)

How does it handle the tone without editing your dictation?


Yes, think this needs to be way up on your priority list.


Point taken - Safe mode goes out this week.


Yeah - April learns how you speak/correct your emails - it picks up your writing patterns and keeps evolving. The more you use it, the more it sounds like you rather than generic AI.


Can you explain a bit more about this? Are you building a profile of what I write and who I write it to? Fetching relevant examples and passing that through some (cloud?) LLM when writing the email?

I'm definitely curious on the technicals but there is also a bit of a trust element here - both on trusting that my email (likely some of my most sensitive data) is handled with care and trust that the actual responses are phrased well.


Sure, the data stored are (User's relation to the sender) + tone + way of writing.

None of the email's actual content is/will be stored (Goes against gmail's compliance)


Your privacy policy and security page say you do not use any user data for training, it also says you don't store any user data. How do you square that with this comment?

- https://tryapril.com/security - https://tryapril.com/privacy


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: