Emile

Emile is an SMS-based self-improvement bot that helps you get to bed earlier. It prescribes you a weekly bedtime goal based on your past progress and then keeps you accountable to it through check-ins, encouragements and mini-reflections.

Emile stemmed out of me and my co-founder Charlie’s mutual obsession about personal goals and our dissatisfaction with the products we had tried. We wondered what a first-principles approach to self-improvement could look like and wanted to see if analog systems that have been proven to work for staying accountable to your goals (e.g: hiring a coach, having a gym buddy etc) could be scaled using technology.

We started texting our friends from a Google Voice number to see what would happen. One of our most interesting findings was that when we helped someone get to bed earlier, it had a ripple effect on the rest of their goals. We came to consider good sleep a prerequisite for long-term self-improvement and began automating what was working into a chatbot.

We used a combination of our own code and tools like Slack, Dexter (Rivescript-based bot building platform), Google products and A LOT of Zapier to build the product.

Every response baked into Emile's lexicon came out of the manual messaging we did in our early days by asking ourselves "What would be a sensible thing to say in this context?". We kept throwing responses at our beta testers and iterating until we nailed down Emile's voice as the friendly but not-so-human bot that lives in your phone.

Working with Conversational UI has allowed us to maintain a tight feedback loop with our end users. We've been able to iterate 10x faster than we could with an app or a website because it's mostly copywriting. We can promise someone a new feature during a user interview and deploy it in an hour.

From Day 1, we made the design decision to only deploy Emile on SMS. Personal goals are personal, and we want the product's access point to reflect that. This also keeps us honest about building out Emile into the kind of chatbot that could earn a place in someone's SMS inbox next to their loved ones. With every new interaction we think about adding, we ask ourselves "Does this interaction add enough value to the user to warrant a text message?" Keeping Emile SMS-only also has the added benefit of not having to download an app during onboarding.