Intro

A few months ago, I left Workday and started a sabbatical. I had big plans for my first month off – finally dive deep into all the industry insights, technical articles, and thought leadership content I'd been bookmarking but never had time to properly consume. I was excited to learn without the pressure of immediate application to my day job.

What I discovered instead was overwhelming. My carefully curated list of newsletter subscriptions – sources I'd specifically chosen because they contained valuable information – had become an unmanageable flood. On my first Monday of sabbatical freedom, I opened my inbox to find 47 unread newsletters waiting for me. These weren't spam; they were from publications I genuinely respected and had paid for.

Around the same time, I'd been experimenting with NotebookLM, Google's AI research assistant. I was fascinated by how it could ingest documents and create an interactive knowledge base that I could query and explore. But the process was still manual – I had to upload each piece of content individually, and I found myself thinking: "What if this could just happen automatically? What if all my subscribed content was already processed and waiting for me to explore?"

That's when the lightbulb went off. I realized I was caught in a productivity paradox: I subscribed to these newsletters because they contained valuable information for my learning goals, but the sheer volume made them a source of stress rather than enlightenment. I needed something like an automated NotebookLM for my information diet – a system that would continuously process everything I cared about and present it in a way designed for exploration and understanding.

Problem

The modern professional's relationship with information is fundamentally broken, and the data tells a sobering story:

Information overload is crushing productivity. Knowledge workers spend 2.5 hours per day searching for information, and 90% report feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information they need to process. We're subscribing to more content than ever before, but our tools for managing it haven't evolved beyond the basic inbox.

The "subscription paradox" is real. People subscribe to newsletters and content sources because they're valuable, but then avoid reading them because the volume is unmanageable. This creates a cycle of guilt and inefficiency – you're paying (with attention and sometimes money) for content you never actually consume.

Manual summarization is time-intensive. When professionals do try to stay on top of their reading, they resort to manually copying content into AI tools for summaries. This process is tedious, inconsistent, and doesn't scale. Most people end up abandoning the practice entirely.

Context switching kills comprehension. Jumping between your email client, web browser, note-taking apps, and AI tools to process a single piece of content creates cognitive overhead that reduces both understanding and retention.

The "zero inbox" conflict. Many productivity-conscious professionals want to maintain inbox zero, but newsletters make this nearly impossible. They're not urgent like emails, but they're too valuable to delete, creating a constant state of inbox anxiety.

Who is it for?

Citato is designed for information-hungry professionals who have outgrown basic email management but aren't ready to abandon valuable content sources entirely.

Specifically:

Tech-savvy professionals who subscribe to industry newsletters, market analysis, and thought leadership content

Former Google Reader users who still miss having a dedicated, organized way to consume subscribed content

Knowledge workers who find themselves manually copying content into AI tools for summaries

Anyone who maintains newsletter subscriptions but struggles to keep up with the volume

Professionals who want to stay informed without sacrificing their inbox organization or mental bandwidth

Why build it?

The inspiration came from my own frustration, but the "aha moment" came when I realized two things:

The summarization process could be completely automated: With access to email content and AI capabilities, there was no reason to manually copy and paste content for summaries. The entire workflow could happen in the background.

Content consumption could be reimagined: Instead of treating newsletters like emails (urgent, reactive), what if they were treated more like an RSS feed (organized, intentional) with AI enhancement?

The market timing is perfect:

Newsletter subscriptions have exploded, with platforms like Substack reporting 500,000+ paid subscriptions and growing

AI summarization technology has reached a quality threshold where it can reliably extract key insights from long-form content

Remote work has increased information consumption needs, with professionals needing to stay current across more domains than ever

The death of Google Reader left a gap in organized content consumption that existing email tools never properly filled

What is it?

Citato is an AI-powered reading companion that automatically transforms newsletter overload into organized, actionable insights. Think of it as having a personal research assistant that reads everything for you, extracts what matters, and presents it in a format designed for quick decision-making.

How it works:

📧 Seamless Email Integration – Citato connects directly to your Gmail inbox to automatically process newsletter content:

No manual forwarding or copying required

Automatically identifies and processes newsletter content

Maintains your existing subscription workflows

Keeps your inbox clean without losing valuable content

🧠 Smart AI Summaries – Every piece of content gets intelligently processed:

Concise summaries that capture key themes and insights

Tone and style preservation from the original content

Automatic extraction of actionable takeaways

Identification and highlighting of important links and resources

📱 Unified Content Feed – All your processed content lives in one beautiful, distraction-free interface:

Browse everything in a single, organized view

Filter and search across all your subscriptions

Decide what deserves your full attention based on AI-generated previews

Save and organize content for later reference

🔖 Bookmark Intelligence – Beyond newsletters, Citato handles any content you want to save:

Instant AI summaries of bookmarked articles and links

Remember why you saved something with context-aware descriptions

Build a searchable knowledge base of valuable content

⚡ Key Takeaways & Link Discovery – When you do decide to read the full content:

Automatically generated bullet-point summaries of key insights

Extraction and organization of relevant links and resources

Easy sharing and note-taking capabilities

The result? You maintain access to all the valuable content you care about, but consume it on your terms – efficiently, purposefully, and without the overwhelm.

Interested?

Citato is accepting waitlist users