Devlog #4: Product Development Without the Hustle

Jetson is our autopilot for customer feedback. It reads your Help Scout inbox and automatically turns conversations into bugs, feature requests, and documentation drafts, then syncs them with GitHub where work happens. No more copy-pasting support emails into issues or missing patterns in customer complaints. We’re building it because we’ve spent years drowning in support across multiple SaaS products.

How We’re Building

Derek Sivers wrote in Anything You Want that business is an open world for experimentation. We’re taking that seriously. Our experiment: build a company where the co-founder relationship and our actual lives come first. Not as a nice-to-have. As goal number one. Jetson exists to support our lives, not the other way around.

What does that mean in practice?

• Jetson remains “just a project.” It shouldn’t require sacrificing anything.
• No 70-hour weeks. The product helps others achieve work-life balance. We should have it too.
• We’re building with friends because building with friends is the dream.

Every decision below flows from this.

This Week’s Technical Focus

Two architectural changes: restructuring the data model around mailboxes instead of organizations, and replacing dropdown-based status filters with an interactive tab system.

Mailbox-Centric Billing

The original organization structure was too tightly coupled to Help Scout. We’re restructuring around mailboxes as the core unit: organizations own mailboxes, users have access to specific mailboxes, and billing ties to mailbox count rather than seats.

This accomplishes three things:

• Decouples the data model from any specific integration (important for future Zendesk support)
• Justifies moving away from per-seat pricing
• Simplifies permission logic for team access

Status Tabs Over Dropdowns

The feature request and bug report pages needed better UX for tracking item progression. Items marked as “implemented” were still appearing alongside active requests.

The solution: replace the status dropdown with clickable tabs. Each status becomes a filterable view, with archived items hidden by default. We’re adding pseudo-Kanban functionality where users can drag items between status tabs.

We considered a full Kanban board but decided against it. Columns add clutter, and most users don’t need to see all statuses simultaneously. Tabs with drag-and-drop provide the same workflow without the overhead.

What We Built

• Duplicate detection outside clustering: A backup system that catches duplicates clustering sometimes misses.
• Multi-issue ticket handling: PR 482 adds support for customers who send multiple bug reports in a single message.
• is_resolved flag reimplementation: Integrated into bug and feature creation. For users with years of conversation data, correctly identifying resolved items significantly reduces the active inbox size.
• Onboarding block page: When a user connects a Help Scout account already registered to another organization, they see a page prompting them to contact their admin.

What We’re NOT Building (Yet)

• Email digest: Removed entirely. Focusing on UI and demo video instead.
• Time filters: Auto-resolving items should handle inbox management. Users with extensive historical data can choose a start date during import.
• Full Kanban board: The tab system provides enough workflow visualization.

Clustering Refinements

Current cluster names are too generic. We need titles like “recipe card features” rather than broad categories. Two changes planned: prompt adjustments for more specific titles, and adding the product context learning cron job to create smaller, more focused clusters.

Next Steps

• Record demo video: bug report to Help Scout to Jetson to GitHub issue
• Invite external tester to production
• Full onboarding flow walkthrough before broader outreach
• Delay company incorporation to January 1st to avoid 2024 tax complications
• Read Stripe Atlas docs to decide between C Corp and LLC
• Create and sign a founders agreement