The Secret to Building Sticky AI Products - Ep. 42 with Chris Pedregal

Chris Pedregal knows how to build AI products that people love.

Chris is the cofounder and CEO of Granola, an AI notepad for meetings. We use it all the time at Every—Granola listens in on a meeting and, when it ends, generates notes and a shareable transcript for anyone who missed it.

Granola is one of my favorite consumer AI products because it’s equal parts delightful and useful. So my question for Chris was:

How do you do it? How do you make an excellent product in AI?

We spent an hour talking about:

• How Chris uses intuition while making product decisions

• The importance of building products with “soul”

• How to develop your product thinking muscles

• When Chris trusts his gut over listening to user feedback

• How fewer users gives startups a leg up over big tech

• Why Chris is bullish on founders building specialized AI tools for professionals

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in building valuable, sticky AI products that users will love.

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Timestamps for Spotify:

1. Introduction (00:00:48)
2. How Chris made early product decisions at Granola (00:09:14)
3. Chris’s philosophy around product development (00:13:36)
4. When to follow your intuition v. listen to your users (00:19:24)
5. How to build a product with “soul” (00:20:40)
6. Chris’s advice on becoming a better product thinker (00:25:12)
7. The role travel plays in shaping Chris’s intuition (00:31:17)
8. Why having fewer users is an advantage for AI startups (00:45:52)
9. Why Chris is bullish on startups building specialized AI tools (00:52:09)
10. Where Chris sees Granola in the next year (00:56:52)

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Chris Pedregal: @cjpedregal

• Granola: http://Granola.ai, @meetgranola

• The piece Chris wrote for Every about building useful AI products: https://every.to/thesis/how-to-build-a-truly-useful-ai-product