Philosophy
A few things we keep coming back to while building this. Not a manifesto, just how we think about the work.
Minimalism
Most software gets bigger every release. We try not to. If we’re not using a feature ourselves, we cut it. What’s here today is what’s left after a lot of stuff got deleted.
Transparency
You can see what Backdoor did and why. Every founder it pitched, every lead it passed on, every reason behind a draft. If something looks off, you can check. We’d rather show our work than ask you to trust us blindly.
Simplicity
It runs in iMessage. You text it. That’s the interface. The dashboard exists if you want to poke around, but you don’t have to live in it. Most weeks you won’t open it.
Reliability over generality
We tried building this on a general agent first. Claude, GPT, the rest. They’re great at one-off tasks. They fall apart on the kind of multi-week workflows we run. They forget what you wanted, they invent companies that don’t exist, they contradict yesterday’s plan.
So we built our own harness. A bunch of small, boring, predictable pieces, each doing one job well. The model only steps in where there’s an actual judgment call to make.
Trust by default
Nothing goes out without your tap. Every claim Backdoor makes has a source. Human-in-the-loop is the default, even when it’s slower. One bad email under your name is worse than ten you didn’t send.