Jon Lemelman couldn’t focus. Every time he sat down to review the latest new deals and prepare for his 30 calls and meetings that week, he first had to sift through his email, Slack, and various other applications searching for the key tasks, messages, and nuggets of data he needed to do his job.

The incessant habit loop of toggling through Slack, email, various spreadsheets, back to email, and repeating the whole maddening cycle was the attention-sapping thread running through his entire workday.

And he wasn’t alone. “I realized our deal teams were doing the same thing,” he told Charlie Gifford of New Heritage Capital and Andy Greenberg of Greenberg Variations Capital (GVC) on their podcast, Middle Market Musings.

”They were spending multiple hours a week organizing email and data rooms and spreadsheets, and that’s just not something humans need to do anymore.”

This was the problem that planted the seed for Classify: Jon was frustrated with how companies of all sizes and industries had accepted information overload and constant context-switching as another part of the job. Putting information in context was the first step of every task on Jon’s daily to-do list, and he was not satisfied with all the time and manual effort it entailed.

He knew there had to be a better way to get context on meetings and projects, organize digital information across his applications, and create more time in the day to focus on his most important work. But he couldn’t find a tool that solved this need effectively in the marketplace.

So he built one.

In a recent interview with Middle Market Musings, Jon explains why he created Classify to solve his own problems and talks through the process of developing an antidote to information overload.

Listen to the full episode here or scroll for a summary of the conversation:

It all starts with team building

Jon had the idea, but he knew he needed a talented team to bring the concept to fruition. He partnered with Tait Larson, an experienced engineer and former startup cofounder, to spearhead company operations alongside him.

“He’s a local guy in Boston, one of my close friends, and a software architect from Stanford. He’s bought and sold a number of startups.”

The co founders then set about building a lean team to handle key functions, including engineering, product development, product design, and marketing. Jon had a few criteria in mind when assembling the Classify squad.

“First, it has to be fun,” he said. “I always try to find folks who find joy in what they’re doing. The problem we’re solving and the way we’re trying to solve it is really challenging and innovative. And it requires a very, very high degree of capability and learning agility. We’re trying to do something that’s never been done before.”

The backend of a solution that organizes troves of data, files, and messages and puts that information in context within a sleek UI is pretty complex.

“We've assembled a small but mighty full-time team that is supported by world-class angel investors and advisors. The entire family is very hands on with customers, ensuring that product design, engineering, and data science are all working together to rapidly iterate with our customers.”

Bringing the product to the right audience

In its first iteration, Classify was built for the private investing markets. Its target users were private equity investors and partners like Jon who were sick of wasting time at work monitoring and tracking down information.  

While Jon was able to validate the need among investors, bankers, and lenders, the highly-regulated financial services industry also introduced a lot of friction when it came to finding early adopters.

The team knew there was a much wider available market at B2B SaaS companies and startups, where teams were eager to try new solutions and optimize their workflows in creative ways.

Any knowledge worker – particularly product managers, customer success managers, and those in customer-facing sales roles – needed to monitor, organize, and contextualize tons of information each day to do their jobs effectively.

A solution that reduced information overload and automated the most low-value, irksome aspects of work would let these professionals focus more of their time on solving problems and delighting customers. So Jon widened the scope.

“The kernel of the business is exactly the same,” said Jon. “It’s all about automating the organization of all of your digital information so you can spend more time thinking, or playing golf, or whatever you want to do – but not spending time sifting through files and messages.”

Regaining control of our time and attention

At the core of Classify is a desire to regain control of our minds in a world where technology is infringing on our ability to focus, markedly deteriorating our attention spans, and dominating way more of our time than we ever imagined it would.

“I’ve found myself really held back with the sheer volume of email I needed to process to do my job properly,” Jon said. “It was overwhelming and very anxiety provoking.”

The Classify team deeply resonated with the message of the documentary The Social Dilemma, which centers Tristan Harris and his mission to build less exploitative technology. The  ex-Google design ethicist and founder of the Center for Humane Technology has seen firsthand how persuasive design techniques have negatively impacted our mental health on a global scale.

Apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok are built to keep users consuming content and staring at their phones for as long as possible. The addictive tactics UX designers and engineers at these companies use to keep us engaged have rendered much of the population helpless to stop scrolling.

“Technology, left unchecked, stimulates us beyond our capacity,” said Jon. “Classify is a utility that lets you do more human things and lets computers do what computers are good at, which is processing lots of pieces of information really quickly.”

Building humane technology into the product vision

Employing a humane approach to UX design is central to the Classify product strategy.

“Our hope is that with more humane technology, you won’t have to spend as much time in front of a screen,” Jon said.  

Slack is a great example of a tool that solved one problem but created another. The instant messaging app meaningfully reduced the friction of sending work-related messages, but in doing so, made it a lot easier to waste time at work responding to the countless pinging notifications interrupting our focus.

The result? Whole companies have lost their ability to focus on high-value tasks due to low-value distractions, resulting in a longer, less-productive workday.

Reducing the amount of time workers spend checking Slack, email, and various other communication apps during the most productive hours of the day is one step toward releasing the grip technology has on our attention spans.

“Multi-tasking is horribly inefficient – this concept of context-switching, where you’re switching between email to a phone call to Slack to reading a purchase and sale agreement – your brain has to readjust every time you context switch,” said Jon.

Jon wants Classify to help knowledge workers across industries do their best work in less time.

By reducing context-switching and empowering the world’s knowledge workers to focus on the tasks that really matter, the Classify team hopes to place the emphasis on working smarter rather than working long hours.

Want a better way to organize your digital information and get the context you need exactly when you need it? Try Classify. It’ll help you stress less.