Exact

I built an app because autocorrect kept ruining my texts in French

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Hey everyone !

Quick story — I'm French, and if you've ever typed in French on macOS or iOS, you know the pain. Autocorrect "fixes" words into things you never meant to say. I once sent "je suis excité" (which has a very different meaning in French than "I'm excited") to a client. That was the last straw.

So my co-founder and I built Exact — a tiny AI-powered writing assistant that lives in your menu bar. You press Ctrl+Space in any app and it instantly fixes spelling, grammar and syntax. No copy-paste, no browser extension, no switching tabs. It just works wherever you type — emails, Slack, iMessage, even code comments.

We're a team of 3, bootstrapped, and honestly still figuring out a lot. But the core product is solid and we use it ourselves every single day.

Would love to hear from other makers:

  • How do you handle multilingual writing tools? We're starting with French but thinking about expanding.

  • For those who launched a utility app — what was your biggest lesson on retention?

Happy to answer any questions about the stack or the journey so far

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Alex Rotar
Oh no, the 'je suis excité' mistake is a total classic! 😂 Love the native menu bar approach—frictionless UX is everything for a utility app. Regarding your question on retention: the key we've found is making the 'time-to-value' literal seconds. If they have to configure it, they bounce. We are actually tracking those exact types of user-journey milestones today as we launch ChangePoints on PH! Congrats on shipping, the bootstrapped hustle is real.