The Gumloop Handbook

Why does Gumloop exist

We want anyone to be able to automate their work with AI. We started Gumloop in April of 2023 and have been working on the same problem since day 1.

Origin story

Gumloop was originally called AgentHub and Version 1 was a simple UI wrapper around an autonomous agent framework called AutoGPT. At the time, to use the framework you needed to be somewhat technical because you had to clone the code and set it up locally. We built a UI for fun and hosted the framework in the cloud so everyone could get to play with agents, no coding experience required.

Agents felt like the first time non-technical people could really tinker with AI and apply it to their own use cases.

Back in 2023, the models were nowhere near good enough for agents to be actually useful. Users were begging the agents to do the simplest tasks and never getting anything in return. We shifted our focus away from AutoGPT and built a workflow building platform. Think an AI-native Zapier on steroids.

This drag and drop workflow builder caught on and led to the growth of our user base. We built over 100 integrations and the scalable infrastructure to manage these huge workloads. The platform automated over 800 million tasks before we reintroduced agents.

The models finally got good enough and we luckily had all the infrastructure in place to easily build agents on top of. Agents finally brought the learning curve of automation past the threshold of "anyone can do it" and have led to what Gumloop is today.

Want to see the world's craziest coincidence?

I met Rahul (co-founder/CTO) the very same day my old co-founder quit and it was all caught on video. If you skip to 4:59 in the following video, you'll hear me say, "My co-founder quit this morning so I'm looking for a new one" (that did actually happen, he quit and said AgentHub wouldn't work at 11 AM that day). The next person to speak in the video is Rahul, excitedly asking a question about the product. He was contributing code to the project 24 hours later.

I can barely watch this video back because of how monotone and boring I am. They asked if anyone else wanted to present, I raised my hand and winged it because I didn't have much to lose.

To read more about what the product looked like on day one, check out this blog post.

What is Gumloop today

Gumloop is the agent platform that some of the world's biggest companies use to build, monitor and manage internal AI agents. Everyone within a business, not only engineers, can build agents, connect them to tools and share agents across their teams to automate work.

What do we want to achieve

Let anyone have the impact of an engineer

We want to enable every non technical person in a company to solve their own problems without needing to loop in a technical team. Anyone should be able to deploy their own AI powered tools that 10x their teams productivity without needing to write a large spec, sync with leadership, allocate budget etc.

Understanding the task should be the only requirement for automating it, no other expertise required.

Get our users promoted

Almost every existing business has massive inefficiencies. We notice Gumloop starts to spread internally within a company when a "champion" starts automating work and showing their coworkers.

This champion always has the same 3 characteristics:

1. They understand the problem(s)
2. They know what AI can do
3. They know Gumloop exists

If you're reading this post you probably have #3 locked down (or you're super lost). 1 and 2 tend to come naturally to that person because they spend time around the problem as a result of their job and they're excited by AI enough to frequently use LLMs.

This person will often become the "AI person" internally and will make their leadership team shed a tear of joy because they're finally "leveraging AI" like the CEO asked, but in a useful way.

We want to be their secret weapon that makes their division 10x more efficient and gets them or their team promoted.

Edit: 3 of these users went as far as joining Gumloop full time. They were power users from Instacart, Webflow and Shopify but now work at Gumloop because they wanted to help more of the world feel the magic.

Where We're Going

We want Gumloop to be such an outstanding product that marketing is an afterthought. Word of mouth from thrilled users should be our main growth engine. To get there, we have some core improvements to make to the platform that we're building towards.

Become the operating system for enterprise automation

We started off focusing purely on workflow automation but things have evolved into something much more powerful.

With every layer we've added, we've seen Gumloop turn into more and more of a central piece of AI infrastructure that businesses rely on. It's becoming a single offering that has everything an enterprise needs to become AI native. We've been working to address every question enterprises have when rolling out agents. How do you build agents, share them, manage data access, see what they did, manage spend? Every question here and more is addressed with Gumloop.

We've realized how powerful this is and will keep building in this direction until Gumloop is a must have for every enterprise.

Make automating fun

We want people to be excited to build on Gumloop. It should be something they look forward to.

Every decision we make should be in pursuit of that. Obviously the core functionality should be snappy, scalable and handle every workload but the finer details and UX are equally as important. Everything from loading animations, to keyboard shortcuts, to notification emails matter.

We're going to keep improving the user experience until we're in the same category products like Linear, Figma, Apple etc.

How We Make Users Happy

One key differentiator between us and competitors is how much effort we put into caring for our users.

Support

Gumloop can be used in an infinite number of ways. That's great but it also means our users can get stuck, confused or frustrated in an infinite number of ways.

Having absolutely top tier support plays a key part in ensuring our early users have a great experience. We take great pride in it as well.

Same day shipping

We used to joke that we were like Amazon because we had "same day shipping". When a customer would request a new integration or feature we'd try to get it out by that night's release.

Obviously this velocity got a bit harder to maintain as our user base grew but we still try to build customer feature requests as quickly as we possibly can.

Users seeing features they request in the product within days helps prove we're truly building for them. They can participate in steering product direction by just asking.

Listening to feedback and iterating constantly

Every time a user complains about anything at all, we write it down and try to act on it somehow. The first version of our automation builder was an unusable hunk of garbage. Gumloop has only become what it is today because of thousands of small iterations that were driven by direct user feedback.

Sometimes this is super straight forward when people message us saying "here's some feedback". Most of the time it comes in unexpected ways. Every support ticket, unexpected error or confused clicks during a demo call is feedback in its own right.

We try to keep our iteration cycles extremely short so tweaks to the product can be felt continuously. Most of the time we're shipping updates nightly to address the days feedback!

Strive to feel embarrassed

Looking back at demo videos from even a month ago should feel embarrassing. If we're not embarrassed, the product isn't improving fast enough and we're failing our users.

Who We Want To Work With

We want to grow the team but also want to make sure the right people join the team. We're aiming to keep the talent density as high as possible and have put a lot of thought into what kind of person we're looking for!

Relentlessly resourceful

This is by far the most important quality we look for. This is also the most important quality in a founder which isn't a coincidence.

Being able to just make things happen. Digging deeper into the problem when you get stuck is ideal.

We as founders don't have a plan b, or an engineering manager to turn to when we get stuck. Obviously we collaborate and will be extremely supportive but having that same end-of-the-line approach to hard problems is a must.

Optimistic by default

Building a startup takes a lot of optimism. There are so many people along the way pointing out every reason why something won't work. Those people are boring. If we'd have listened to them, we'd have given up day 1.

We want someone who's looking for the reasons things will work and leaning into them. Alternatively, if something isn't working we want to find a new approach that does rather than getting discouraged.

Excited to build

When working as part of a tight-knit team, attitude matters a ton. The mood in the room is an average of those who fill it.

We want to work with someone who's as excited to build for our users as we are. Building as a team is really fun and we hope everyone we hire will add to that atmosphere, maintaining or bringing the room's average.

This screenshot above was from when we started Gumloop. We were working together 24/7 since this exchange.

There's a specific feeling you get when you meet someone who's excited about the same things you are. You leave the conversation with more energy than you entered it with. We're excited to build great product for our users. We hope whoever we hire is just as excited.

Reliable

We want someone we can rely on. You'll always be able to rely on us, but it'll need to be mutual.

Knowing that great work is being done without needing to second guess things is the dream.

Where we build

Gumloop started out of an apartment in Vancouver and the majority of the team is still Canadian. We recently opened an office in San Francisco and are committed to building in both cities. Canadians shouldn't have to leave the country to work at a fast-paced AI startup. Vancouver is home and always will be.

Please reach out

If you think you fit these criteria and want to join the team please email me at max@gumloop.com

PS: One way to really set yourself apart is to actually try the product thoroughly. 99% of people who apply have clearly never tried to use Gumloop. If you do, you'll have a massive advantage.

What It's Like to Work at Gumloop

Here's what'd it'd be like to work on the team.

20 minute standup

We don't have 'sprints' in the standard sense. We find it impossible to plan 2 weeks in advance if we're updating the product daily. We have a 20 minute meeting each morning in which we discuss priorities for the day, almost like a mini sprint planning.

We try to keep all other meetings to an absolute minimum. If you need to talk to someone just walk up to them in person to chat.

Focus work

The majority of everyone's day is dedicated to focused work. That doesn't always mean working in a silo, it can be collaborative because in our view focused work is any time you're 100% focused on making the product better.

Sometimes we'll have a 2 hour whiteboard session working through design challenges. Sometimes we're fixing bugs or building completely new features. It all counts. As long as most of the day is spent doing this we're doing the right thing.

Papercut + User Interview Friday

Throughout the week we find many small issues with the product that aren't worth fixing immediately. We call these "papercuts". They're not anything urgent but they can add up and really ruin a users experience on the platform. On Friday we try to take the entire day to tackle those.

Merging into production on Friday should feel like a breath of fresh air if we did this right.

Backlog grooming

We currently don't have any predefined sprints. We like to build as quickly as possible, iterate often and ship updates on a daily basis. New things pop up every day so planning more than a week into the future would feel silly with the current pace.

We have an ever changing backlog of tasks separated by priority and size. Urgent are the tasks we're focusing on today, High are those we want to tackle this week, medium in the next two weeks etc.

Everyone is responsible for adding tasks to the backlog and categorizing them to help define direction.

Offsite hackathons

Renting an Airbnb and having a company hackathon has resulted in some of our most impactful work as a company. No distractions. Just a bunch of people who love building cool product in one place working together.

We also try to take time to decompress when we're there and go outside. Last hackathon was in Whistler BC Canada and we spent an afternoon rock climbing. Spending some time away completely detached from work is important to the fun of it all.

So far we've gone to Squamish, Whistler BC, Yosemite, Paso Robles, Vancouver, Napa and San Rafael. Many more trips to come!

Onsite hackathons

Sometimes we'll agree to collectively tackle a part of the product that needs love. We'll find a nice place in the office to set up, order a bunch of food, brainstorm on a whiteboard and start hacking into the night as a team.

Moving faster and caring more is how we win.

More to come

If you made it all the way to this last section, you might be interested in joining the team!

If you're serious about it, check out our careers page for open roles at gumloop.com/careers. If you do want to email me directly about the role feel free to do that too but I get a ton of spam so please try out the product before emailing. I reply to everything that someone put effort into sending.

Photos

We've been trying to photograph the experience of building a company.

Check out a timeline of what it's really like to work at Gumloop here.

I'll keep updating this handbook as we grow.

— Max