Frequently Asked Questions

Catalyst is a voice-first AI assistant that helps you track your career progression through short daily check-ins. Each morning you state what you're heading into; each evening you describe how it went. Once a week, Catalyst synthesizes the answers into a structured record of your contributions — the one you'll wish you'd had at appraisal time.

Mid-career knowledge workers — engineers, PMs, designers, data analysts, technical writers — roughly five to fifteen years into their careers. The common trait isn't job title. It's the recurring experience of leaving money on the table at appraisal time, not because the work wasn't there, but because it couldn't be articulated under pressure.

Most performance reviews are lost in the three days before they're submitted. You scramble for bullet points, you forget the hard months, and you under-count the invisible work — the unblocking, the knowledge transfer, the risk mitigation. Catalyst captures that work the day it happens so it isn't a memory exercise six months later.

A journal is a blank page. You write what you remember to write — usually a sentence or two on the days you find time. Catalyst is a conversation. You sit down and say "nothing big happened today." Eight minutes later, you've described how you talked a frustrated colleague through a brutal review, caught a regression hours before it shipped, and made a judgement call that saved the team a week of rework. None of it would have made it into a journal. All of it matters at appraisal time. Journals capture what you remember; Catalyst draws out what you'd never think to mention.

Two short conversations a day. In the morning, you set your intentions — what you want to push forward, what's weighing on you, what would make today count. In the evening, you debrief — what went well, what was frustrating, what you learned. Each one takes a few minutes, and at the end of every week you have a record of the work you did and the value you brought, ready to point at when it matters.

Daily is where Catalyst earns its keep. The point is to make the debrief a small, automatic part of how your day ends — the way locking the door or charging your phone already is. The people who get the most out of Catalyst are the ones who treat it as a five-minute ritual, not a chore. Skip a day and nothing breaks. Skip a quarter and you'll feel it the next time someone asks what you've been working on.

The work you don't think to mention. Most people remember the launches and miss the rest — the quiet save, the unblocking that never made it into a ticket, the colleague you brought up to speed, the scope you absorbed without anyone formally noticing, the trust you rebuilt with a stakeholder who used to push back on everything. That invisible work is usually the difference between a flat appraisal and a strong one. Catalyst's job is to surface it.

Yes. Catalyst takes both voice and text — use whichever fits the moment. Most people lean on voice because speaking surfaces detail you'd never bother to type, and a five-minute conversation tends to be richer than a written log three times its length. But on a quiet train or in a noisy office, typing is right there.

No. You speak; Catalyst replies in text. The conversation flows back as words on the screen — easy to scan, easy to reread.

The moment you realise you got more done than you thought. Every week, Catalyst pulls your conversations together into a single picture: what you accomplished, the themes that kept coming back, where you created the most value, and the contributions you've been quietly under-counting. Over a quarter, those weeks stack into a full performance narrative — not a blank page to fight through, but a draft you can edit.

No. Catalyst is explicitly designed for the user, not the employer. No admin panel, no manager dashboards, no "enterprise visibility." The whole premise of the product depends on you speaking candidly about colleagues, managers, and the work itself — which requires that no one else can see it.

Your raw voice transcripts stay on your phone, in an encrypted local database. When you have a conversation, it's sent to our AI provider for processing and then discarded — we don't keep raw transcripts on the server. The longer-term picture — your weekly syntheses, your profile, your career narrative — lives on our Canadian backend, under Canadian data protection law.

The voice is transcribed once, immediately, and then the audio is gone. We don't keep voice files — only the transcript moves through the AI pipeline.

Claude by Anthropic handles conversation and synthesis. OpenAI's Whisper handles the voice-to-text step. Both providers have signed Data Processing Agreements covering this use. Neither provider trains on Catalyst customer data.

Yes. Account deletion wipes the server-side record, and the on-device transcripts go with the app when you uninstall.

Yes. Export is a first-class feature — not a customer-service escape hatch. You can pull your full history (raw conversations plus weekly syntheses) as a structured file at any time.

Your data stays accessible in read-only mode for a grace period, and you can export it before it's deleted. We don't ransom your career history against a reactivation.

No. The AI has one job — surface achievements you might otherwise miss — and no mandate to grade, rank, or flag you. It doesn't maintain a "performance score." If you describe a bad week, it helps you articulate what you learned; it doesn't file it as a black mark.

Two layers of protection. First, your data isn't accessible to anyone but you — nothing you say is shared with your employer or with any other user. Second, the AI is designed to redirect away from topics outside its scope. It's not a therapist, not an HR tool, and not an advisor on workplace mistreatment — and it won't pretend to be.

The AI doesn't invent accomplishments. It asks follow-up questions about what you describe, and the weekly synthesis is built entirely from your own words. If something in your synthesis surprises you, it came from something you said — sometimes two weeks earlier, which is exactly why the product exists.

Transcription errors do happen. You can review and edit your transcripts at any time, and the weekly synthesis is editable before it becomes part of your career record. The AI is a first pass, not a final source of truth.

Within scope, yes — framing contributions for impact, suggesting angles you haven't considered, identifying patterns in your work. Outside scope (office politics, managing difficult people, negotiating specific compensation), no. Those conversations are risky to automate and we'd rather not automate them badly.

Yes. Voice check-ins and the weekly synthesis will always be available on a free tier — enough to build the habit and feel real value before deciding whether to pay.

The longitudinal features: quarter-over-quarter career intelligence, the appraisal document generator, trajectory suggestions, and output formats for resumes and interview prep. Roughly — the free tier is daily; the paid tier is the career-level view.

Pricing isn't finalized. The target is in the range of career coaching and LinkedIn Premium — which is to say, priced to what a strong appraisal outcome is worth, not to what a productivity app costs. Annual billing will be emphasized so the payment cycle aligns with the value cycle (appraisal season).

Through the early access list on this site. Early members get free access during the closed beta and grandfathered pricing when it goes paid.

The closed beta is running now via TestFlight, with new members coming in from the early access list each week. Public launch on the App Store follows once the core experience is fully baked.

Yes, both. Whichever phone is in your pocket, the morning and evening debriefs are right there.

No — Catalyst lives on your phone. The morning and evening check-ins are built around the device you already carry with you, the one that's there in the kitchen, on the train, on the walk home.

Canada and the United States. Starting with one region lets us get privacy, performance, and product right before we widen the door.

English. The conversation work — drawing out the right detail, framing it for impact — is language-specific in a way the underlying technology isn't, and we'd rather do one language excellently than several adequately.

Most people walk into reviews with a hastily written self-assessment full of the two or three most recent things they remember. Catalyst walks in with a quarter-by-quarter record of everything you did, structured the way reviews are evaluated — impact, scope, complexity, collaboration — with the invisible work made visible.

That's a core paid-tier feature. The AI takes your synthesized history and generates a draft appraisal document in your own voice, which you then edit. Not a template you fill in — a draft built from the year you actually lived.

Yes. The same longitudinal data powers resume drafts, interview-prep talking points, and evidence for specific promotion criteria (scope, influence, technical depth, etc.). The paid tier is where this shows up.

Your data is yours. The history you build in Catalyst moves with you — it doesn't reset when your employer changes. Arguably, it becomes more valuable at that point, since you're about to need narrative evidence for interviews.