side quests
the pursuits around the company — firefly, the early startups, the podcasts, the courses, and the columnists' own projects.
the founders' quests
- 2011–2014firefly · endeddan's college startup — a cobrowsing customer-support tool built with justin meltzer at upenn. first round's first dorm room fund investment ($20k), y combinator s13, ~$600k raised, sold to pegasystems for $2.5m the week of graduation. the operating rep that funds the later writing life.
- 2019the sleep-mask company · endedthe sleep-protecting blackout-mask company dan ran on shopify during the wilderness years — a physical-products rep between the pega exit and the newsletter. 'i am a terrible programmer' era.
- 2019–2020the four-draft novel · endeda pre-every 50,000-word fiction attempt — four drafts of a novel plus an illustrated novella about entrepreneurship. the writing rep that never stopped.
- 2022–2023lex · handed-offlex — the ai word processor nathan built inside every on nights and weekends after parental leave; ~25,000 waitlist signups in a day, spun out august 2023 as lex ai, inc. with a $2.75m true ventures seed. every retains a stake; the spinout became the template.
- 2023–ai & i · activeai & i — twice-weekly, guests screen-share their actual chatgpt/claude histories: reid hoffman, tyler cowen, kevin kelly, dwarkesh patel, sarah tavel, mike krieger, claire vo. ~120 episodes; the front line of the agent-era coverage.
- 2023-02the lenny bot · endedthe lenny bot — a gpt-3 q&a over lenny rachitsky's newsletter archive, built in a weekend and shipped in public with honest retention numbers. the proof-of-concept for 'build in public, write the field report.'
the company's quests
- 2020-01sparkle v1 · handed-offsparkle v1 — a mac tray app auto-sorting desktop/downloads into para-style folders, bundled exclusively with superorganizers premium before every existed. the software-plus-writing bundle in miniature.
- 2022the courses · endedthe course era — 'how to write with ai' and the prompt-engineering course ran at ~$650/seat before the apps existed. consulting's ancestor: the expertise monetized before it was productized.
- 2024-06spiral · activespiral — the prompt-builder for repetitive writing tasks, grown from dan's claude workflow for automating the 'business of writing': 3,000 users and 16,000 runs in four weeks, all organic. danny aziz rebuilt v3 essentially alone with claude code.
- 2024-08sparkle v2 · handed-offsparkle v2 — the ai file organizer rebuilt by gell and javi ezpeleta on gpt-4: filenames only, deleted after 30 days. the 2020 tray app, given a model.
- 2024-10every studio · activeevery studio — the product-incubation arm formalized: five entrepreneurs-in-residence, a $150k 'speed round' from sahil lavingia, and a claim that a media company's distribution + editorial can de-risk early software. cora, monologue, and sparkle all ran through it.
- 2025-02every consulting · activeevery consulting — ai adoption work for mid-to-large orgs, after nine months quiet: a proprietary 'paradigm' reporting tool, claimed nps over 70, pacing $1–2m. natalia quintero runs it.
- 2025-06cora · activecora — the 'ai chief of staff for your inbox': screens email, pre-drafts replies in your voice, sends a twice-daily brief. kieran's mvp in a night, 10k waitlist by february, ga june 2025; nearly burned six figures on inference before the cost-down work.
- 2025-09monologue · activemonologue — ai voice dictation for mac; naveen built v1 in a weekend because existing tools 'aren't quite right.' ~7,000 dictations a day at launch; the fastest path from studio incubation to bundle product.
- 2026-03proof and plus one · continuingproof — a vibe-coded collaborative doc editor that went viral, fell over under load, and became a public postmortem. plus one — one-click ai coworkers in slack; every's own agent employee is named claudie.
the alumni and the ecosystem
- 2025–the leverage · continuingthe leverage — evan armstrong's solo business publication after napkin math; launched with the template every gave him ('as an equity holder, i certainly hope so'). the collective model's alumni.
- 2022–2026the visual language · handed-offlucas crespo's visual language — the art direction that made every recognizable; left for openai's creative team in 2026 after building a gpt-4 digest bot with zero prior programming experience.
- 2021–the collective's shelf · handed-offthe alumni shelf — the publications and tools the collective produced: tiago forte's praxis, nat eliason's almanack, li jin's means of creation, fadeke's cybernaut, chris bosh's the last chip, and the spun-out lex. the bundle's output outlived the bundle.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.