✨ what magic should feel like.
at last: a way to solve the mental load in a light and delightful way.
What is magic?
As a parent, it’s not an idle question. I live in and actively enable a world filled with tooth fairies and Santa Claus. Magicians and Harry Potter. But also in Special Rock or the Perfect Twig. In soapy bubbles and sticky ice cream.
With kids, magic is everywhere.
But while it is abundant, it cannot be taken for granted. Magic vanishes the second is it assumed as a given.
So what then, is magic?
I ask this question often because I think parents could use more magic in their lives. I know I could.
The buoyant feeling of hope and infinite possibilities. Of not knowing how something works, just that it does. Of trusting. And believing. And not being let down.
And yet, in some weirdly cruel twist of fate or modern parenthood, we seem destined to constantly live in the presence of magic, just not benefit from any of it for ourselves.
But parents need magic. We deserve magic.
It’s the one belief above all that’s guided me on this almost comically long “wandering in the desert”, in search of how to solve the invisible load for families. The thing that saps our time and attention and takes away from the things that we should really be focused on - the relationships and the parenting and the silliness and the being.
In this search I inevitably came up against: if it felt even a bit magic, it wasn’t scaleable/affordable. And if it was scaleable/affordable, it felt miles from magic.
I know what I demanded was unreasonable but I needed to be unreasonable on behalf of the millions of us muscling through the ridiculous every single day, who can’t demand it for themselves.
And I’ve always known what we all want:
A clone of myself who would take all the chaos directed at me and just deal with it. Figure out what needed to be done and just do it. Then tell me what I needed to know, when and if I needed it.
But where to start on how hard that is to do in practice:
I can’t clone myself so anyone outside of me is going to need to learn my very personal, very irrational and very invisible context (without making it another job for me to have to tell you).
There’s a lot of chaos to corral. And I don’t want to have to upload all these things to some app. Or add to-dos to the right list or even create a calendar event to invite everyone to. More work.
I don’t want another thing to look at. Or worse, nag my husband/nanny/mom to also look at. Another app to download and deal with.
You have to get it all right. I’m fine with messing some things up myself, but if you get a date wrong or miss something, you are dead to me immediately.
I could go on, but I won’t. Suffice it to say, it’s a bear of a problem.
And for honestly years now, nothing we tried really got us to magic without sacrificing cost and scale.
Until now.
Sometimes you have to be patient. To sit with a problem, to bide your time until something comes along to enable it. Unlock it.
Make magic possible.
In this case: AI. Not the questionable, ambiguous kind of the past years, but the real, tangible stuff that actually works. Large language models to be specific.
It’s far from perfect but “intelligence” based on predicting text is an incredible force to throw against the walls of text parents get everyday (school newsletters, Whatsapp messages, bday party invites, soccer registrations….).
It has so many limitations, but guess what: so do humans and regular rules/logic based software.
The key is in figuring out where each can sing and having them work in harmony on this bear of a problem.
It’s far from sexy, and it’s painstaking to figure out and we’re only still at the starting line, but you know what it gets you on the other side?
✨ Magic.
So much more to share in the coming days but I’m here to tell parents: Believe in magic. It’s real. And this time, it’s 100% for you.
-avni
***
Want a sneak peek?
The first step in this magic is just doing the simple, basic things well and fast.
Here’s the behind the scenes look at how the things you text or email in (bday party invites, school reminders, to-dos..) get dealt with on the other side by our human helper (me 😅), paired with AI, to make it fast, accurate and the way you prefer it.
Want to help us kick the tires and test it out?