A file per client, kept warm.
Not a CRM you update. A record that assembles itself out of the calls you were on, the threads you were in and the things you already said.
It fits if you carry five to fifteen client relationships and the context for each is spread across calls, email, Slack and your own notes. Stilou keeps a file per client on your Mac, built from what you already do, so you walk into a call knowing what was agreed and what you owe. It is single-user and macOS only — it will not replace your agency's shared CRM.
You're not paid to remember. You're paid for the judgement that needs remembering.
Fifteen minutes before a call you open four tabs. The last meeting's notes, if someone wrote them. The email chain, to see what was promised. Slack, to check the thing they were annoyed about. And your own notes, which are in a document called Untitled 3.
You assemble a picture, have a good call, and then the picture evaporates. Next month you do it again from scratch, and this time you miss the bit from April — the sentence where they told you what they actually care about, which was the single most useful thing anyone said all quarter.
The tragedy is not the prep time. It is that the judgement you are paid for gets worse the more clients you carry, precisely because the evidence for it is scattered. And the CRM does not help, because nobody fills in a CRM about a conversation they had on a walk.
What changes
The file exists because you worked, not because you maintained it.
The call is captured without a bot.
Joey listens on your Mac. No visible participant joins, nobody has to consent to a stranger in the waiting room, and in-person meetings work too. What was decided and owed comes out filed to that client.
Everything lands in the same file.
Calls, Gmail threads, Slack, your dictations and the screenshot of their deck all attach to the relationship they belong to — because they mention the same people and projects, not because you tagged them.
Prep becomes a question, not an excavation.
“Brief me for the ten o'clock” answers from the file: what was agreed, what is owed, what they were unhappy about. With the sources shown, so you can check the ones that matter.
Client material stays on your Mac.
Most consulting work is under an NDA that never anticipated an AI tool. Private mode runs on-device, so the answer is that nothing was transmitted — not that a policy says it was handled well.
Walking into a renewal with the whole history
Every step below uses something that ships today.
- Across the quarterThree calls with Fernbank Studio, a Slack channel and a long email thread. Joey covers the calls; the connectors read the thread and the channel.
- In AprilYou dictate one line walking out of a meeting: they care about lead time more than price. It files itself to Fernbank.
- Before the renewalAsk what you agreed and what is still open. The answer includes that April line, which you had entirely forgotten, alongside the two promises Cadence has been tracking.
- AfterThe follow-up drafts in your voice from the call that just happened, rather than from a template that sounds like everyone else's.
Warto wiedzieć. The April line is the whole product. It is the kind of thing nobody files, everybody forgets, and clients notice when you remember.
Narzędzia, które mają tu największe znaczenie
Wszystkie 13 są w jednej aplikacji. Te zwracają się najszybciej przy takim tygodniu.
Where Stilou won't help you
- It is not a CRM and cannot be sharedNo pipeline, no deal stages, no reporting, and nobody else can see your file. If your agency runs on HubSpot or a shared account plan, Stilou sits beside it — it does not replace it.
- No team handoverThe single most valuable thing an agency could want here — passing a warm client file to a colleague — is exactly what a private, single-user brain cannot do. That is a real limitation, not a roadmap tease.
- macOS onlyNo phone app. Client calls taken on your mobile between meetings are outside it.
- It will not bill, schedule or invoiceNothing here touches time tracking, proposals or invoicing, and it is not going to.
Read honestly: this helps the individual consultant's judgement, not the agency's operations. If the problem you are solving is coordination between five people, buy something else.
Najczęstsze pytania
Does a bot join my client calls?
No. Joey listens to what your Mac can already hear while you take rough notes, so no visible participant appears in the meeting and nobody has to admit a stranger from the waiting room. It also means in-person client meetings are captured the same way. Granola made this design choice first and we agree with it — see our comparison.
Is this safe for client work under NDA?
In Private mode the model runs on your Mac and nothing is transmitted, which is the only honest answer to an NDA question. In Connected mode the passage a request needs goes to a hosted provider that is contractually barred from training on it. The app shows which mode you are in, and /privacy lists it surface by surface.
Can I share a client file with a colleague?
No. There is no export-to-teammate, no shared workspace and no permissions model. The brain is local and single-user by design, which is the right trade for privacy and the wrong one for a growing agency. Worth deciding which of those matters more to you before you buy.
How many clients can it hold?
There is no client limit — the brain is a set of files on your own disk and grows with what you capture. The practical constraint is disk space, not a plan tier.