Leading and building Raycast (Changelog Interviews #587)

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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.

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Featuring:

• Thomas Paul Mann – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• Raycast.com
• One interface, many LLMs

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapter

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: FireHydrant (00:01:24)

https://firehydrant.com/signals

3. Start the show! (00:03:44)

4. Adam loves Raycast (00:05:20)

5. Why launchers are popular on a Mac? (00:06:28)

6. Beyond launching apps (00:09:00)

7. Why did you build this? (00:15:54)

8. Building with native code on a Mac (00:20:01)

9. We respect your privacy (00:23:05)

10. Are you talking to users? (00:27:20)

11. The team size (00:33:51)

12. Keeping the urgency (00:35:59)

13. I don't see that momentum (00:37:49)

14. Sponsor: Cloudflare (00:39:46)

https://www.cloudflare.com/developerweek

15. That's a nice Changelog (00:42:06)

16. Maintaining a connection to your fans (00:44:51)

17. Solving the "keeping connected" problem (00:48:06)

18. Subtle nudges (00:49:58)

19. No emails of users? (00:53:41)

20. The problem of a broken updater (00:54:18)

21. Building the right thing (00:56:41)

22. What is the Raycast Store? (01:05:25)

23. MIT licensed (01:13:59)

24. Changelog extension for Raycast (01:16:06)

25. More on extensions (01:17:13)

26. Sponsor: Sentry (01:23:35)

https://sentry.io/

27. Sponsor: Factor (01:24:48)

https://factormeals.com/changelog50

28. Let's talk about AI!! (01:26:43)

29. You've got all the models (01:37:50)

30. The UX of sub-apps (01:41:03)

31. Standalone Raycast AI chat app? (01:49:50)

32. Raycast AI chat is hidden (01:51:56)

33. This is brand level challenge (01:54:42)

34. What's over the horizon? (01:58:42)

35. Wrapping up (02:04:17)

36. Closing thoughts (02:05:34)