How I built Empowia for Slack — a tool I made for myself first

I didn't set out to build a product. I set out to stop losing things in Slack.

I'm a heavy Slack user, and for years the same thing kept happening: a decision I needed was three months old and quietly gone, a link someone dropped in a busy channel had scrolled into the void, a file was "somewhere in the DMs." On the free plan, anything older than 90 days just stops showing up. It's not deleted — it's just out of reach unless you pay to upgrade.

So one weekend I built a backup for myself. That's where Empowia for Slack actually started — not as a company, but as a folder on my own machine that finally held everything.

The turn: for anyone, not just me

For a while it really was just mine. The thing that turned it into something else was noticing why the existing backup tools didn't work for the people around me. They all wanted the same setup: register a Slack app, generate API tokens, configure scopes, maybe get an admin to approve it. I'm technical enough to do that — but it locks out everyone who isn't, which is most people who actually need this.

So I threw out that approach and started a fresh build around one rule: if it needs a developer to set it up, it's wrong. Empowia reuses the Slack session you're already signed into, with your permission, and backs up at the same pace Slack itself does. One click to connect. Nothing to register. That's the moment it stopped being my private tool and became something anyone could use.

Good constraints do more work than good features.

I kept losing my own to-dos

Here's a small, dumb moment that happened to me constantly. Someone would ask me for something in a thread, I'd type "yep, on it," and then that promise would vanish under a hundred new messages. Later I'd go looking and end up scrolling back through Slack, channel by channel, trying to reconstruct my own list.

So I built automatic to-do extraction — the AI surfaces the task, who owns it, and the deadline, each with a link back to the message it came from. The to-dos round up on their own now, so I never go spelunking for my own commitments again.

I did try having the AI rank them by importance and urgency too. It was noisy and confidently wrong, so I pulled it out on principle. The AI's job is to find the task; only you decide what matters — you star it yourself. That was a rare "less AI, on purpose" call, and the list has been calmer for it.

I was forever hunting for that one file

The other thing that kept eating my time: a file. Someone had shared a PDF, or a screenshot, or a link to a doc — I could picture it, I just couldn't find it. So I'd scroll one thread, then a second, then search a half-remembered keyword until I landed on it. Every time, it broke my focus.

So I built the local archive — a fast, two-pane browser that feels like Slack, plus a file gallery — so everything I'd shared or been sent lives in one place I can actually search. It runs entirely on my machine, so it's instant. Just yesterday I used it to pull up a file a colleague had sent me weeks earlier, without reopening Slack once. It's the part I use most days, and it's what turned the backup from a graveyard into something I open on purpose.

I couldn't remember what we'd said

And then there was the slowest friction of all: remembering. I'd need to know what we'd concluded about some topic weeks earlier, and to find out I'd reopen an old thread and re-read the whole thing top to bottom, just to reconstruct the gist.

So I built two things for exactly that. Ask lets me question my whole Slack in plain language and get an answer — and I made one call non-negotiable: every answer cites its source message, so I can click straight through and verify it. I don't trust an AI summary I can't check.

Alongside it, Decisions captures the calls that got made and the links worth keeping. It started as simple per-message capture, but I realized what I actually wanted was a topic-by-topic timeline — so months later I can reconstruct how we landed on something, not just re-read that we did. Now I can recall what the team decided about a launch in seconds instead of re-reading a week of chatter.

Running through all of this is one bias I hold hard: precision over recall. I'd rather the AI miss a to-do or a decision than clutter the list with junk. When in doubt, leave it out — half-information makes a dashboard worse, not better.

Then I made it yours, not mine

What's worth keeping is different for everyone. My important channels aren't yours. So instead of hard-coding my priorities, I added custom extraction — you tell it, in your own words, what to pull out (feature requests, bugs, competitor mentions, whatever), and it can run on a schedule so the results stay current. And because I live in other tools too, I added an MCP connection so your Slack archive shows up inside Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT.

Through all of it, the AI is bring-your-own-key. You plug in Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, or OpenAI, and you see the cost of every answer. Gemini has a free tier, so the intelligence can cost you nothing. There's no Empowia server sitting in the middle of your data.

Privacy wasn't a feature. It was the reason.

I want to be clear about this: your Slack never leaves your computer. There's no Empowia cloud, no account to create, no telemetry phoning home. I designed it this way because it's the only version of this tool I'd trust with my own messages. I can't leak what I never receive.

The unglamorous part: polishing

The features are the fun story. The real work was the polishing — making search actually instant, getting the little things right (edited and pinned indicators, custom emoji, light and dark), sanding down every rough edge until the app felt calm. I rewrote copy more times than I'll admit, in more languages than I speak. I want to ship an excellent product; time isn't the constraint. That's the whole pitch, honestly: a tool made by someone who uses it every day and can't stand when a detail is off.

Where it goes next

Enough people wanted it that I turned my weekend backup into a real app. It runs on Windows today — that's where I built it, for myself, first — and more platforms are on the way.

If you want a Mac version, or there's a feature you wish it had, tell me. I genuinely build what people ask for — that's how every feature above got here, one personal frustration at a time. You can download it free and try the whole thing on your own Slack (up to 20 conversations) before you ever pay a cent.

Thanks for reading. Now go find that message you thought you'd lost.

— the maker behind Empowia