A personal assistant you direct, or a work layer for your whole team.
Martin is a personal AI assistant, an assistant for one person. You text it, call it, or email it, and it manages your calendar, inbox, and to-dos, drafts and sends mail, and even texts and calls people on your behalf. this+that is different. It's a team work layer: a universal inbox that reads the messages your team receives across email and chat, turns them into shared tasks anyone can own, runs workflows, and holds team knowledge in a brain. Two different shapes of AI for work, not really direct alternatives.
A personal assistant for you, or a work layer for your team
AI assistants come in different shapes. We think of three waves: Wave 1 is the general-purpose chat you open and ask (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot). Wave 1.5 is the polished personal agent layered on top of chat. Wave 2 is the fit-for-purpose AI that owns one job end-to-end, with UI tailored to it (more in our essay on AI's second wave).
Martin sits in Wave 1.5, the polished personal-agent tier. It is a genuinely good consumer assistant, a Jarvis for one person. You reach it however you like, by phone call, SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice, or Slack, and you delegate: schedule this, draft that, remind me, text her back, do the research. Martin acts as a proxy you direct, and the reach is real. It can pick up the phone and call someone for you, which we cannot do. this+that is one of Wave 2's first products, and it is built for a team rather than an individual. The agent reads the messages your team receives across Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Telegram, whether anyone asked for them or not. What arrives becomes a tracked task the whole team can see, assign, and pick up, plus workflows that run on top. Martin is the assistant for your life admin. this+that is the layer that turns your team's incoming work into something shared and tracked. Plenty of people would happily use both.
Feature by feature
How the two products compare across the things that matter most.
| Topic | Martin | this+that |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Wave 1.5. A polished personal AI assistant for one person, reachable across many channels, wrapping a general-purpose model. | Wave 2. A fit-for-purpose team work layer that lives inside your messages, acting on what arrives without you asking. |
| Who it is for | An individual. Martin is your personal assistant, learning one person over time: your inbox, your calendar, your preferences. | A team. Founders, CEOs, COOs, and CTOs at 20-100 person companies whose shared inbox and chat have become the work. |
| Where work starts | You start it. Text, call, or email Martin to hand off a task and it goes, plus a few proactive updates it sends back on its own. | The messages start it. The agent reads what lands across every channel and surfaces what needs doing before anyone asks. |
| How you reach it | Phone call, SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice, and Slack. You can literally call your assistant and have it call others back. | A web app that is a universal inbox. No SMS, voice, or phone. You work where your messages already live. |
| Channels it reads | Your personal inbox and calendar, plus Slack, as surfaces you delegate from. | Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Telegram, every message scanned for what needs doing. WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger coming soon. |
| Acting on your behalf | A real strength. Martin sends email, texts people, and places phone calls for you as a proxy you direct. | Drafts replies grounded in your brain and runs workflow actions, with approval gates. We draft rather than send by default, and we do not place calls. |
| Task management | A personal to-do list and reminders for one person, managed by texting or telling Martin. | DoBox, a team task manager. Tasks auto-created from messages or added by hand, across multiple shared lists, assigned to specific teammates, with priorities, due dates, labels, checklists, and comments with mentions and attachments. |
| Workflow automation | Proactive actions and routines on your behalf, configured per account. | Plain-language workflows triggered by your messages. 32 action types, conditional logic, loops, autonomous sub-agents, and tool connections over MCP. |
| Memory / knowledge | Long-term memory of you (Pro): your voice, preferences, and the way you like things done. Personal, per user. | The brain, a writable team knowledge layer with version history that grounds the AI's drafts, answers, and workflows. Shared across the team. |
| Pricing | Basic $21/mo billed yearly ($35/mo monthly), Pro $30/mo billed yearly ($49/mo monthly). 7-day free trial. Per person. | Free during beta. |
- For one person's life admin, Martin is excellent. Calendar, inbox, reminders, errands, the small research jobs, it handles the daily grind of being you.
- You can phone it. You can text it, WhatsApp it, email it, or leave it a voice note. That reach across channels is a real strength, and one we do not have.
- It acts on your behalf for real, not just in drafts. Martin sends the email, texts the person back, and will even place a phone call, which most assistants stop short of.
- On Pro, its long-term memory of you sharpens with use, picking up your voice and the way you like things done.
- Pricing is refreshingly simple for an individual: $21/mo on Basic or $30/mo on Pro, both billed yearly, after a 7-day trial.
- We do a different job. The agent reads the messages your whole team receives, across Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Teams, Google Chat, and Telegram, and turns them into shared work. WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger are coming soon.
- DoBox turns those messages into tasks you can assign to a named teammate, with priorities, due dates, labels, checklists, and comments everyone can see and pick up.
- When you want automation, workflows run in plain language off your incoming messages: 32 action types, conditional logic, loops, and autonomous sub-agents.
- The brain holds team knowledge with version history, and it grounds the drafts and answers the AI gives everyone. That is shared memory, not a personal memory of one user.
- Anything with an MCP server or API plugs in through the open MCP standard, so the tools your team already runs connect.
- And it is team-first by design. Shared lists, assignment to named people, and team knowledge are the point of the product, not features bolted onto a personal assistant.
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