From Summarizer to Topic Tracker: What 3 Months Taught Me

People don't want to know everything. They want to know their thing deeply - and be able to prove it.

That single insight reshaped Protime over the past three months. Let me walk you through what changed and why.

The Starting Point

Three months ago, Protime was a summarization tool. It could process your emails, extract what mattered, and give you a briefing. Useful - but generic. The question was: where does this go next?

The Wrong Direction

My first instinct was to build an AI secretary - scheduling, task management, the full productivity suite. The idea lasted about a week. Not because the market isn't there, but because that's a feature war with no edge for a small team.

The Real Pain Point

Talking to users revealed something different. The problem wasn't email overload. It was topic overload. Professionals - product managers, consultants, analysts - need to stay deeply informed on specific subjects. But finding the right sources is miserable. Subscribing to newsletters, managing RSS feeds, filtering noise from signal. Nobody wants to do that work.

What Protime Does Now

Smart Discovery solves this. Tell Protime what topics matter to you - "AI in logistics", "European fintech regulation", "React server components" - and it finds the sources automatically. Newsletters, RSS feeds, research papers, news. No manual curation.

Every morning, you get a briefing focused on exactly what you track. Not a firehose. A precise, AI-generated summary of what moved in your areas overnight.

The Part I'm Most Excited About

Knowing things isn't enough in a professional context. You need to demonstrate it. So Protime now includes a knowledge verification layer.

Here's how it works: after each briefing, you answer a few quick questions about what you read. Over time, this builds a verified track record. You earn badges for sustained expertise in specific topics. A product manager tracking "AI in supply chain" for 30 days straight, consistently demonstrating comprehension, gets a verified credential they can share.

It's proof that you didn't just skim a headline. You actually absorbed it.

What's Next

More of what users ask for. The roadmap is driven by the people using Protime daily, not assumptions. If you're someone who needs to stay sharp on specific topics without spending hours curating sources - this is built for you.

Try it at protime.ai. I read every message at marc@protime.ai.

— Marc