Building Earmark, in public
Notes from the founder of Earmark - on turning meetings into work, building an AI company without burning the boats, and the unedited middle of a startup.
Hi, I’m Mark. My co-founder and I are building Earmark, an AI tool that does the work of your meetings during your meetings - the PRD, the tickets, the follow-up email, the recap - instead of leaving it for 9:40 on a Tuesday night.
This Substack is where I write about what we’re learning as we build it. Three threads run through everything here:
1. The meeting-to-artifact gap. Engineers have IDEs - tools that meet them at the moment of work. Product people, salespeople, and executives got a calendar. The richest, most decision-dense hours of the workday evaporate into a few bullet points, and the real work gets exiled to nights and weekends. I write about closing that gap: agentic workflows, real-time artifact generation, and what it means to treat conversation as the primary surface of knowledge work.
2. Privacy as a wedge, not a feature. Almost every AI meeting tool keeps your data - that’s the business model. We built the opposite: no bot joins your call, your transcripts live as plain markdown on your computer, and you can run meetings in a mode where nothing is stored at all. The surprise? Our no-storage workspaces are our most active users. Privacy didn’t dampen engagement; it unlocked it. I write about local-first AI, IT governance, and why “we hand you a copy” beats “we keep the archive.”
3. The unedited footage of building a company. Most startup content is a trailer - the struggle sanded off. I’d rather show you the raw cut: the six-figure bank deal that died when First Republic got acquired, the four-day infrastructure swap that cut our streaming costs 83% and was nearly the difference between profitable and not, the decision to bootstrap while keeping the fundraising muscle warm. Real numbers, real misses, real judgment calls.
Why listen to us
My co-founder Sanden Gocka and I have spent our careers on the building side of software. I’ve got twenty-plus years in design and development - I was head of engineering at MINDBODY, serving 60,000 wellness businesses and millions of consumers, and CTO at ProductPlan through its acquisition in 2023. Sanden was an engineering leader alongside me at both - MINDBODY’s 400-person delivery org, then engineering director at ProductPlan - after cutting his teeth leading lean teams on hard products. We’ve lived the meeting-crushed leadership life we’re writing about; Earmark is the tool we wished we’d had.
When we write about product decisions, adoption, or AI in the enterprise, it’s from the unglamorous inside of a company betting it can be evidence-based about its own viability.
What you’ll get
A post every week or two. Essays on AI product strategy, local-first architecture, and enterprise adoption; behind-the-scenes numbers from our own business; and the occasional teardown of a decision we got wrong. No fluff, no reposted press releases.
If you spend your days in meetings and your nights doing the work those meetings created - this is for you.
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