Raw Content

How My Company Turned a Data Crisis Into an AI-native Rebirth

The Crisis Stella Garber, CEO of Hoop, faced an existential threat when Slack announced it would cut off critical data access on June 30. Hoop’s AI task manager relied heavily on this datastream to capture action items from Slack conversations. The company’s product-market fit research showed customers found the Slack integration indispensable, threatening customer retention.

The Pivot Strategy Rather than seeking workarounds, Garber’s team recognized an opportunity to fundamentally rebuild as an AI-native company. They established clear guidelines for the new direction:

Build something quickly with either large customer base or high price point
Maintain healthy margins between AI processing costs and pricing
Use AI for transforming unstructured data into useful outputs
Leverage team strengths in design, storytelling, and product taste
Target less technical audiences

The New Product: Hoop Support Tool The team developed an AI-native customer support solution that:

Works directly within Gmail without requiring new software
Automatically generates customizable FAQs by scanning websites and inboxes
Learns company voice and tone to match communication style
Requires only five minutes to set up

AI-First Development Process The company transformed its workflow:

Used ChatPRD as a thought partner for product strategy
Employed agentic coding tools like Claude Code to generate working prototypes
Ran up to 10 AI agents in parallel for accelerated development
Shared insights via dedicated Slack channels with regular demos

Key Insight As Garber notes, integrating AI-first thinking means teams “stop doing the work and start directing it,” enabling operations at vastly different scales.

Timeline to Market The team achieved initial prototype, website, and ad campaign within one week, onboarding their first design partner customer the following week—a speed previously impossible.

The Uncomfortable Truth Senior teams face the greatest challenge accepting that AI can outperform humans in specific tasks. Success requires maintaining humility and curiosity while redirecting expertise toward direction and strategy rather than execution.