I built a custom Slack inbox. It was easier than you’d think. | Yash Tekriwal (Clay)

**Yash Tekriwal** (0:00)
I truly wake up to maybe 100 to 150 new Slack notifications, not even just like, oh, these are unread channels. Truly, someone has tagged me. 60 to 80 percent are more in the FYI category. So my 100 to 150 that's giving me anxiety is actually more like 30 to 40 that I really need to be on top of.

**Claire Vo** (0:18)
You can use AI to do a task for you like categorize things, summarize things, or you can use AI just to build a tool that would have been much harder to build before with very straightforward APIs and structured data.

**Yash Tekriwal** (0:31)
Exactly. Think about like a Kanban style board. You have in red on the left, action required, urgent, Yash needs to get back to it. In the middle, we've got a yellow need to read column, and then on the right in green, much more easy. I have a bunch of FYIs. I can just go ahead and click this Archive All button. They'll disappear from the dash and then those notifications will also disappear on my Slack.

**Claire Vo** (0:50)
That's magic. This is such a better way to just get through your queue.

**Yash Tekriwal** (0:54)
My dream is for someone else to watch this video and say, I want to build that app on top of Slack and then I can go pay that person $15 a month for this app to be maintained and used and then I can file bug reports with them instead of having to fix it myself because I would happily pay that.

**Claire Vo** (1:11)
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, Product Leader and AI Obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Yash Tekriwal, Head of Education at Clay, and he is a hyper optimizer, showing us how he uses Perplexity Computer to work through the hundreds of Slack messages he gets every day. We're also going to debate, is SaaS really dead? Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Guru, the AI layer of truth for your company's knowledge. Here's the problem. Your AI is only as good as the information you feed it. Most companies are getting confident but wrong answers from AI because their underlying knowledge is outdated, incomplete, or just plain incorrect. Bad information doesn't just slow you down. It costs you money and puts you at risk. Guru solves this by adding a verification layer between your company's knowledge and AI tools. Instead of just hoping your AI gets it right, Guru automatically scores content for accuracy, flags outdated information, and ensures your team gets trustworthy answers every time. It works with the tools you already use, so you don't have to change how you work. Thousands of companies trust Guru to keep their AI accurate and compliant. Ready to stop playing Russian roulette with your company's knowledge? Visit getguru.com to learn more. Welcome to How I AI. Yash, I'm so excited. We've been trying to make this happen for months, and we've been trying to make it happen over Slack for months. What I love about that is what we're going to start this episode off with is how you get yourself unburied from the deluge of Slack messages and emails and work you have to do on a daily basis.

**Yash Tekriwal** (3:05)
Yeah. So I wish I could say I had built this back when we were organizing it, but maybe that gives you a little bit more leeway for understanding me losing Slack threads all the time. For context, you can see my Slack screen right here. Right now, I cleared this truly two hours ago, and I already have like another 40 plus messages, of which you can see like eight or more are DMs, and it's just going to keep going up. Right? Now, I truly wake up to maybe 100 to 150 new Slack notifications, not even just like, oh, these are unread channels. Truly, someone has tagged me. It's a DM, they've tagged me, it's a group DM or something else, which all feel very important, but not all notifications are created equal in Slack.
For example, I care much more about getting back to you on scheduling our podcast recording than I do about my colleagues' really fun comment on their dog that they posted a photo of in the fun dog channel, but I get an equal notification for both. And so, what I sort of started doing with Perplexity Computer when it came out about a month ago is thinking, if I could truly just design any software or paradigm myself, what would I do, how and why? And so, Perplexity Computer is actually not exactly how we initially solved the Slack problem. We'll come back to that in just a second. But I think the framework is also what matters most is, I needed to be able to envision what does a better world look like instead of just asking Claude or Perplexity or OpenClaw, make my Slack easier. And so, that better world that I thought of is, if not all notifications are created equal, then what if I could better categorize my notifications by DMs versus group DMs versus threads versus group at mentions, because I treat all those differently. I try to clear my DMs ASAP because I tell everyone, if I'm not responding within 24 hours, DM me. So that urgency needs to be there. But then on top of that, of course, people are DMing me about random things like who wants to go dancing this weekend, who wants to go to dinner for a hot pot this week, and all sorts of other fun things. So even within each of those four categories, the DMs, the groups, the threads, the at mentions, I also want to sub-categorize by what requires real action from me, what do I need to read but maybe doesn't need a response from me, and what are more of the FYI for your information notifications. And as you might guess, a little precursor that I'll give you is like 60 to 80% of my notifications every day are more in the FYI category. So my 100 to 150 that's giving me anxiety is actually more like 30 to 40 that I really need to be on top of, and that makes things a lot easier. But I need to build a system to get there.