The original idea was simple
NewTools launched with a straightforward premise: the AI tool landscape was getting overwhelming. New tools were shipping every week, listicles were everywhere, and there was no curated, searchable place where founders and developers could actually find what they needed without wading through noise and sponsored results.
So we built a directory. Clean listings, honest descriptions, sensible categories, a way to compare options side by side. Tools you could actually trust were in there because someone made a judgment call, not because someone paid for placement.
It worked well enough. People listed their tools. People found tools. We felt pretty good about it.
Then we started noticing something.
What we kept running into while building
As we worked on the directory and spent time thinking about how founders actually use AI tools, a pattern kept surfacing. The problem people had wasn't finding tools. It was everything around finding tools.
People would discover the right tool, leave the site, and come back two weeks later asking the same questions — because there was nothing carrying context between sessions. Every AI conversation they had, across every tab, started from scratch. They'd explain their startup, their stack, their constraints, and then do it all over again somewhere else tomorrow.
The research problem was worse. Founders weren't just looking for tools. They were trying to understand markets, track competitors, prepare for investor meetings, identify customer patterns. That kind of work doesn't fit in a search bar or a single chat message. It requires going deep, synthesising multiple sources, and producing something you can actually act on — not just a paragraph that sounds reasonable.
And everything lived in different places. Notes in Notion. Docs in Google Drive. Conversations in ChatGPT. Research in browser tabs. Code questions in a different Claude window. The average founder's startup knowledge was scattered across a dozen disconnected surfaces, and every AI they talked to had access to none of it.
None of that is a tool problem. It's a context problem.
The idea we became interested in
The more we sat with this, the more it seemed like the real gap wasn't better tools — it was a workspace that actually understood your startup.
Most people use AI by opening a new tab and starting fresh. You type a question, get an answer, close the tab, and next time you start over. The AI has no idea who you are, what you're building, what you decided last week, or what context would make its answers actually useful for your situation. It's like hiring a brilliant consultant who gets amnesia between every meeting.
What if that wasn't how it worked? What if you had a workspace that accumulated context over time — knew your stage, your market, your goals, your previous research — and used all of that to give you better answers without you having to re-explain yourself every session?
That's the idea we started building toward. We call it Founder OS, though the name matters less than the concept: your startup should have memory, and the AI you work with should know you.
What we're building
We're still early. Founder OS is in beta. But here's what exists today and what we're actively working on.
What you can do right now
Chat with a workspace that remembers you. Create a workspace for your startup, describe what you're building, and the AI carries that context forward. You don't start from scratch every session. Your goals, your stack, your focus — it's there when you come back.
Run research that goes deeper than a chat message. The research engine runs multiple searches in parallel, synthesises the findings, and returns a structured report you can download and reference later. You pick the depth: quick lookups for fast questions, or deeper research modes for the things that actually need thoroughness.
Upload your documents and work from them. Drop in a pitch deck, a product spec, customer interview notes, a financial model. The AI reads them, indexes them, and uses them when you ask questions. You stop re-pasting context. It's already there.
Use agents built for specific founder jobs. Not all AI help needs to come from the same general-purpose model. We have agents tuned for research, growth, product strategy, launch planning, fundraising, and more. Each one is set up for its domain rather than trying to be everything at once.
Connect the tools you're already using. GitHub, Notion, Linear, Slack, Stripe — early integrations are live so your agents can reason across real context from your actual business, not just what you've told them.
Set up workflows that run in the background. Scheduled research queries, competitor monitoring, weekly digests. These are the kinds of tasks that eat founder time not because they're hard but because they require remembering to do them. We're building the layer that handles that automatically.
What we're still working on
We're not going to pretend everything is finished. Some things that matter and that we're actively building:
- Richer workspace artifacts and side panels so your research and outputs surface naturally alongside your conversations
- Smarter context-aware suggestions that anticipate what you need before you ask
- Better memory across longer time horizons — right now it's good, but we want it to be really good
- More integrations, especially for the tools most founders are already using daily
- A more polished onboarding that helps you set up your workspace properly the first time
This is a beta. We're building in the open and we're making it better based on what we learn from people actually using it.
Why we're sharing this now
We almost didn't publish this post because it felt too early. The product isn't finished. The directory is still growing. Founder OS is brand new.
But we kept coming back to the same reason to write it: founders who are using AI tools every day deserve to know what we're trying to build and why — not a polished press release version, but the actual thinking. If the idea resonates with where your frustrations are, we'd rather have that conversation now than after everything is buttoned up.
NewTools started as a directory. It's still a directory, and that part isn't going anywhere — it's the foundation. But we're increasingly focused on a harder problem: helping founders think, research, and operate more effectively, not just discover tools. Founder OS is our attempt to explore that idea.
If you've spent time re-explaining your startup to every AI you open, or wished your research lived somewhere it could build on itself, that's exactly who we're building for.
Frequently asked questions
Is Founder OS finished?
No, and we're not pretending it is. It's in beta. The core features work — workspace memory, research, document upload, agents, integrations — but we're actively improving them and building what's missing. If you try it and find something broken or something you expected that isn't there, that's useful feedback, not a surprise.
Is NewTools still a tool directory?
Yes. The directory is the foundation and it's still growing. Founder OS is built on top of it — the tool catalog is embedded into the workspace, so when you ask for a recommendation inside Founder OS you're getting results from the real catalog, searched by meaning rather than keyword.
Who is this actually for right now?
Early-stage founders, solo builders, and indie hackers who are doing the work across multiple domains and want a workspace that knows their startup. It's not enterprise software and it's not trying to be. It's built for the person who is doing the research, the building, the growing, and the thinking all at once.
How is this different from using ChatGPT or Claude directly?
The main difference is memory and context. A general-purpose AI starts fresh every session with no knowledge of your startup. NewTools accumulates context over time and has research and agent capabilities designed specifically for the work founders do. If you use ChatGPT and find yourself re-explaining your company in every conversation, that's the gap we're trying to close.
Is it free to try?
Yes. The free tier gives you access to the core chat experience, tool discovery, basic research, and one workspace. Pro unlocks deeper research modes, unlimited workspaces, longer memory, all agents, document uploads, workflow automation, and integrations.
Try it while we're still building it
The best time to try a product in beta is before it's finished — you get more influence over where it goes, and the founders who show up early tend to be the ones who shape it most.
If you want to try Founder OS, create an account and set up a workspace. Tell it about your startup. See if the memory actually helps. Run a research report on something you've been meaning to dig into. We want to know what works and what doesn't.
And if you're building a tool that founders and developers should know about, add your listing to the NewTools catalog. It's free, it gets indexed into the tool intelligence layer, and it makes you eligible to be surfaced when someone describes exactly the problem you solve.
