Designing the Tool We Wish We Had

Here at Kipon, we’re a team of unapologetic nerds about a lot of things and we go deep. One topic that always comes up is how much we care about good products. We obsess over the craft of apps like Things and iA Writer, the fluidity of Linear, the ubiquity of Raycast, the quirkiness of Discord, the high performance of Zed, and so on. These tools are part of our daily rituals. I could also mention a graveyard of products I deeply dislike. You know a bad product the second you use it. You can list features and flaws, sure, but at the end of the day, a bad product is one you simply don’t want to come back to. You don’t feel attached to, there’s no joy, and no vision.

Let’s be honest: a lot of our daily work feels like a chore. A good product should help with that and not add more to it. And if there’s one category that consistently disappoints, it’s people management tools. I’ve tried them all. The classics, the new kids on the block and none of them ever truly worked. None of them ever made me want to use them and return the next day. As a founder in previous ventures, it was always a unfaithful pursuit.

Now, in the middle of this global tech shake-up, I took on the challenge: let’s build the best people management product we possibly can during this post-AI uncertainty. Things are changing blazing fast. Many autonomous solutions are taking space: Cursor, Copilots, 11x, Lovable. These solutions are augmenting human power or automating tasks once handled by people. They push us to rethink how and where we would leverage our unique capabilities to solve our daily team’s challenges.

One thing’s clear: copy-pasting the old sorrow-as-a-service blueprint won’t cut it and we need a whole new logic here, bringing people to the center, tying together scattered insights, and finally understanding humans with depth.

As a product person, the only way forward was to go back to the roots: build something well-crafted, fluid, ubiquitous, quirky, fast, and proudly nerdy. Let’s go.

Frictionless & Cozy

At Kipon, we believe a people management product should seamlessly fit into the flow of work, while also sparking enough curiosity and value to keep people coming back to the application. We need to make the commute good, but the return home even better.

Wherever you are, Slack, Linear, HubSpot, plain-text on email, we need to be there. Kipon should blend in, help you act fast, give you insight, do actions. But when you return to the product itself, it should feel like coming back to your own cockpit. You should feel like you’re playing the people management game with cheat codes (in a good way).

We want you to feel like you’re exploiting the bureaucracy, not the people. That you’re helping your team learn faster, prioritize better, and move with clarity. You'll know when to hire, when to coach, when to assemble different teams and You’re going to understand the gaps, the friction, the potential.

You need to like using it. The interface should intrigue you. The colors, the fast response, the animations, the power, they should make you want to stay. That’s why Kipon is made of four core components:

- Connectors: bridging your favorite apps and bringing people context in and out.

- Khipu Reasoning Engine: our own logic core, based on deep academic research, connecting dots no dashboard ever could.

- A geek interface: clear, fluid, with the right actions always one tap away.

- Proprietary agents: doing the hard, boring, repetitive stuff for you.

Putting everything in its proper place isn’t easy. However, we are already shipping it.

Alive & Engineered

We’re building Kipon not just to solve a problem, but because we care deeply about the experience. We care about elegance. We care about flow. And we care about the kind of depth that invites curiosity. We don’t want people to just use Kipon, we want them to enjoy unfolding it.

The interface needs to surprise you, the experience to comfort you, and the intelligence to make you wonder how you ever worked without it. Something that feels alive, sharp, and deeply aligned with how real people work, not how systems think they should.

This is about building something we’re proud to use every day. Because that’s how we use products and how we think products.

Rico

cofounder of Kipon