Cleo

About

The average lean startup burns 6 to 10 hours a week on PM admin that nobody wants to do — standups, chasing follow-ups, capturing decisions out of chat threads, asking who owns what. Cleo (trycleo.ai) is the AI product manager that lives where your team already lives — Telegram and Slack — and runs that work for you while you ship product. It launched on Product Hunt this week and the Telegram bot is live now at t.me/try_cleo_ai_bot. The product's core claim is direct: most early-stage teams promise themselves a $90K-160K junior PM hire 'next quarter' and never make it. Cleo is the bridge. On the free tier, it is the bridge that pays back zero of the $120K you did not spend. The Five Trust Levels (This Is The Interesting Bit) Cleo ships with five permission tiers. At level one — observer — Cleo just watches your chat and tells you what it would do. At level five — operator — Cleo updates Linear tickets, sends emails through Gmail, and books calendar slots on your behalf. You move it up the ladder when you trust it, not when the vendor wants you to upgrade. The architecture is unusually mature for a Product Hunt launch. The trust-level design also fixes a real problem with AI agents: the moment they get write access, mistakes scale. Observer-then-operator is the right gradient. Transparent Memory Is The Actual Differentiator Most AI agents store the facts they learn about your team in a vector database you cannot inspect. Cleo does the opposite. Every fact — 'Sarah owns the auth flow rewrite', 'the Q3 OKR is 30% activation' — shows the source message it came from, a confidence score, and a one-tap correct or delete button. The agent's memory is auditable. This matters because the failure mode of long-running AI agents is silent drift. The agent learns something wrong on Tuesday, repeats it on Friday, and by week three the team is making decisions on top of a corrupted memory layer. Cleo's design is built to make that failure visible inside the chat where it happened. What The Free Tier Actually Covers Three active automations and unlimited memory. For most lean teams that is one daily standup + one followup-chaser + one decision-capture loop. That is the PM admin most lean teams actually need. The Telegram bot starts working as soon as you add it to a group. Integrations with Linear, Notion, Gmail, and Calendar are included. Who Should Install It This Week If you are a solo founder running multiple projects in Telegram threads and the standups never quite happen — install it. If your engineering team is 3-12 people and you have been quietly putting off the junior PM hire for a year — install it. If you run a distributed contractor team on Telegram where Slack PM tools never reached — install it. If you already have a working PM (or a tight Linear-native workflow that runs without rituals), the free tier is still worth wiring up just for the decision-capture and follow-up chasing. The compounding value of a chat agent that remembers who said what on Tuesday is hard to feel until you have lived without it for three weeks and then turn it back on. For context on how AI agents are compressing operational and professional-services budgets across verticals, see related coverage of Anthropic's Project Glasswing displacing pen-test spend and the OpenAccountants open-source skill pack applying the same playbook to bookkeeping and tax.

Key Features

• Lives where your team already does — native Telegram and Slack agent. No new app to install for the team, no behavior change.
• Five trust levels from 'observer' (read-only) to 'operator' (Cleo updates Linear, sends emails, books calendar). You upgrade Cleo's authority on your own schedule.
• Transparent memory: every fact Cleo stores shows the source message, a confidence score, and a one-tap correct/delete. No black-box memory drift.
• Auto-runs daily standups in chat — collects updates, chases stragglers, posts the summary, flags blockers.
• Chases stale follow-ups and captures decisions out of chat threads into a structured record.
• Integrations with Linear, Notion, Gmail, and Calendar so the agent can actually act, not just summarize.
• Learns the team's tone in days from real chat history, so the bot does not sound like a corporate sentry.

Use Cases

• 1Solo founders running five projects at once who keep losing track of decisions buried in Telegram threads.
• 2Lean engineering teams that need a daily standup but cannot justify a $90K-160K junior PM hire.
• 3Distributed teams across time zones where async standups in chat are already the default.
• 4Product leads who want a 'second brain' that captures decisions in chat without forcing the team to leave chat.
• 5Founders running a Telegram-first community or contractor team who need Slack-style PM rituals on the Telegram side.