Leading and building Raycast (Changelog Interviews #587)

Apr 17, 2024

Thomas Paul Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Raycast, discusses productivity on a Mac, community-built extensions, Raycast Store, and executing Raycast AI chat. Raycast evolves into a full-on productivity tool with AI access, paving the way for future developments.

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Exploring Incident Management Tools and User-Centric Product Development

03:13 • 2min

The Evolution and Advantages of Application Launchers

05:16 • 24min

Building a Strong Team and Maintaining Product Momentum

29:35 • 10min

CloudFlare's Developer Week Announcements Roundup

39:47 • 2min

Diversifying Communication Channels for Audience Engagement

42:16 • 23min

Managing Extensions Store in Software Ecosystem

01:05:14 • 14min

Attributing Ownership and Authorship in Software Development and Sponsorship Discussion

01:19:25 • 3min

Navigating Brand Communication in a Fractured Social Media Landscape

01:21:57 • 2min

Exploring Sponsor Ads from Sentry and Factor

01:23:38 • 3min

Navigating the AI Overload in Tech Products

01:26:57 • 14min

Balancing User Preferences and Design Challenges in Application Development

01:41:02 • 23min

Exploring the Potential of Raycast AI Chat as a Standalone Application

02:04:18 • 4min

This week Adam is joined by Thomas Paul Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Raycast, to discuss being productive on a Mac, going beyond their free tier, the extensions built by the community, the Raycast Store, how they’re executing on Raycast AI chat which aims to be a single interface to many LLMs. Raycast has gone beyond being an extendable launcher – they’ve gone full-on productivity mode with access to AI paving the way of their future.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 11 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

FireHydrant – The alerting and on-call tool designed for humans, not systems. Signals puts teams at the center, giving you ultimate control over rules, policies, and schedules. No need to configure your services or do wonky work-arounds. Signals filters out the noise, alerting you only on what matters. Manage coverage requests and on-call notifications effortlessly within Slack. But here’s the game-changer…Signals natively integrates with FireHydrant’s full incident management suite, so as soon as you’re alerted you can seamlessly kickoff and manage your entire incident inside a single platform. Learn more or switch today at firehydrant.com/signals
Cloudflare – Read the Developer Week 2024 wrap-up or tune into Developer Week on Cloudflare TV.
Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 90,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
Factor – 50% off Factor ready-made meals! Pick your ready-made meals, choose from 35+ fresh, never-frozen meals and 55+ add-ons, every week. Gourmet chefs prepare your meals, so you can enjoy more of your time to focus! Heat, eat & enjoy — No prep. No mess. Factor meals arrive ready to heat and eat in 2 minutes. Learn more at factormeals.com/changelog50

Featuring:

Thomas Paul Mann – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!