We don’t sell saddles here (and why that matters for Earmark right now)

I re-read Stewart Butterfield’s old essay “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” this week and it hit uncomfortably close to home.

The essay is basically a warning: if you’re building something that changes how people work, you can’t market it like a nicer version of the old tool. People won’t go shopping for “the future.” They’ll go shopping for something they already understand.

That’s the trap for Earmark.

On the surface, Earmark looks like it lives in the “meeting notes” category. And if we let the market define us that way, we’ll spend our lives competing on summaries, transcripts, and who has the prettiest recap.

But that’s not what we’re building.

Earmark isn’t “notes.” It’s the missing execution layer that starts the moment the meeting starts. Decisions get captured while they happen. Owners and dates don’t get lost. Tickets and follow-ups get drafted in real time. The meeting ends and the work is already in motion.

In Butterfield terms: we’re not selling saddles. We’re selling horseback riding.

Or, in our world: we’re not selling meeting recaps. We’re selling an operating model where meetings stop creating documentation debt.

That framing matters today because the default mental model in most orgs is still:
Meeting → notes → follow-ups → docs → tickets → status churn

Earmark collapses that chain to something closer to:
Talk → decisions → artifacts → build

And here’s the uncomfortable part Butterfield points out: when you’re selling a new behavior, you don’t get to be “pretty good.” The product has to feel inevitable. The first experience has to be so crisp that a user instantly thinks, “Wait… why have we been doing it the old way this whole time?”

So the work for us right now isn’t just shipping features. It’s shipping clarity:

• Clarity in how we describe what Earmark is (not “AI notes,” but “meeting-to-work”).

• Clarity in how we onboard (first artifact in minutes, not a tour).

• Clarity in what we measure (time-to-shippable artifact, not word count in a summary).

If we do this right, we don’t “win the notes market.” We create a new expectation: that product work doesn’t require a second shift, and meetings should produce finished outputs - not more busywork.

That’s what Earmark is here to do.