It was a hot August day in Portugal

My partner and I were finally on holidays for a (short) week. For some context, we both work in IT, sometimes on the same projects, sometimes not.

I remember we were outside and starting talking about ... work. Yes, on holidays. Well, it takes some time to disconnect, right?

Anyway, we were just ranting about a project we were working on, not satisfied with the direction. "We should start our own project". It was not the first time we were talking about it. But this time, I don't know why, we really started to fantasize about it. Talking about how free we would be with our schedule, how we could build it the way we want, how we could maybe get a bit of a passive income, etc. In short, we started dreaming about it.

There was one problem though: we didn't have an idea. In our minds, the process was: first, you get an idea, then you decide to start a project. Now we wanted to start a project with no specific idea.

Sunbathing in the garden, we started to think about the last issues we faced at work. I remember they had asked me to find something to replace Intercom because it was too expensive (especially given our limited usage). I had also worked on a few improvements of the Notion workspace to improve the business flows. That's when I thought it would be great to be able to move our customer support in Notion, where all the other business processes were already handled.

We started to investigate on how to do it but there was one main piece missing: the email integration. There were some products on the market, but not one that I thought I could actually use for that use case.

That's how Slap was born.