Some of you have been with us on this journey for a long time. You've seen many iterations of Oasis, but TalkTastic is the best product we've ever built, hands down. Just yesterday, one person used it to create 76 voice notes (!) in 10+ different apps.

Tonight, at midnight, we are launching TalkTastic for macOS on Product Hunt and I’d love your support! I’ll send a reminder first thing in the morning.

How You Can Help

1. Follow TalkTastic on Product Hunt ← Right Now

2. Upvote – Show your support by upvoting TalkTastic

3. Share – Spread the word among your friends and encourage others to check it out.

4. Review – If you’ve had a chance to use TalkTastic, please leave an honest review to help others understand its value.

5. Amplify – TalkTastic is the next evolution of Oasis and our mission to enhance human communication beyond the limits of biology. If any of this resonates with you, please share TalkTastic with any reporters, podcasters or bloggers who might be interested in talking to me about our product, mission, and vision for the world.

🌟 Follow TalkTastic on Product Hunt 🌟

Why TalkTastic Matters

TalkTastic is designed to make writing faster and easier for all mankind, but here are a few groups that I think will instantly fall in love with TalkTastic:

• Remote Workers and WFH Freelancers: Write at the speed of thought. Stay in flow and don’t worry about typing out the words.

• Non-Native English Speakers: Communicate confidently with precise transcription and context-aware suggestions.

• Digital Immigrants and Older People: Write with your voice instead of typing. Stop hunting and pecking for keys on your keyboard.

• ADHD Entrepreneurs and Neurodivergent Peeps: Reduce cognitive load, fix writer’s block and write faster by talking out your thoughts instead of typing.

Your support in this launch will help TalkTastic reach more people who can benefit from this tool, just as I and so many have.

A Personal Thank You

I cannot overstate how much your support has meant to me throughout this journey. From the earliest days of Oasis to the launch of TalkTastic, your belief in us and our mission to enhance human communication beyond the limits of our biology has been a constant source of motivation. Thank you for being by our side and helping to bring these products to life.

The future is going be fantastic.

Cheers!
-Matt Mireles
Founder/CEO, TalkTastic (formerly Oasis AI)

I’m Matt Mireles, founder of Oasis AI and I want to extend my heartfelt thanks for being a part of our journey. Today, I’m thrilled to introduce you to TalkTastic, the best product I've ever built.

✨ Try TalkTastic for Free ✨

TalkTastic makes you sound like a better version of you, not a robot. Just press a button and speak in any app on your computer.

Unlike any other dictation software you've tried, TalkTastic understands your context. It analyzes your computer screen to interpret your speech, spell names correctly, and rewrite what you said to fit your personal context.

• Contextual speech recognition

• Personalized rewrites

• Seamless integration with macOS

In the future, we'll be publishing a scientific research paper on our speech recognition breakthrough, as the accuracy of our patent-pending approach blows away OpenAI Whisper, ChatGPT, Google, et al.

As members of our community, I wanted you to be the first to try TalkTastic and see why I think it’s a tool you will use every hour, every day.

Download TalkTastic for Free on your Mac with this link.

I’ll be sharing more insights tomorrow. If you have some free time, now is the perfect moment to take TalkTastic for a spin.

Please LMK what you think of TalkTastic. Send me a voice note or just hit reply to send me an email.

Cheers!
-Matt

✨ Try TalkTastic for Free ✨

Hey Folks,

Can you do me a solid and upvote OASIS AI today before midnight PST? 🙏

After pouring our hearts and souls into this company for the last 4+ years, we launched OASIS AI on Product Hunt this morning. It's a new iPhone app that transforms natural speech into perfect writing in any format. 

• emails & essays

• LinkedIn, WeChat posts

• notes & to do's

People LOVE the app. We are almost at #1 on PH, need a few more votes to crack the top. 

THANK YOU. 

-Matt Mireles
Founder/CEO, OASIS

🚀 Vote for OASIS AI on Product Hunt 🚀

Real-time look at what’s happening at OASIS right now

OK, this is f'*cking incredible.

I started digging into our Mixpanel data. The results from the last 3 weeks are INCREDIBLE…

60% of users created >= 2 recordings
35% of users created >= 3 recordings
12% of users created >= 6 recordings

We have 1,509 activated users who created 1 recording or more.

77% of users shared content!!! 🔥🔥🔥
49% shared 2x or more

Share: anytime a user taps the share button, copies to clipboard or screen captures

This all based on a first-pass look at our data in Mixpanel. I am working on adding cohort analysis charts, cost tracking and 7 day / 30 day retention stats.

If you know anyone who is a Mixpanel whiz that can help us get setup with world-class analytics fast, pls intro me ASAP.

We are sprinting to launch OASIS on the  App Store. From there, we will add a web app, multilingual speech input, language translation, text-to-image, text-to-speech with voice cloning, text-to-video with face cloning and more with lightning speed.

Our goal is to build the AI super app for communication. An app that turns your thoughts into effective communication that any human can understand.

If you want to talk, book a time.

-Matt Mireles
Founder/CEO, OASIS

PS If you haven’t downloaded OASIS yet, I strongly urge you to do so right now.

📱 Download OASIS Now 📱

🎙️ OASIS: AI communication assistant

We just unveiled OASIS - our brand new AI communication assistant for the iPhone, and the response has been nothing short of amazing. With OASIS, we're giving you the power to effortlessly transform your scattered thoughts and jumbled words into clear, polished communication - all without lifting a finger. Just talk, and OASIS takes care of the rest.

With OASIS, you can record a voice note and watch as it's magically transformed into:

🤩 Clarity (summary)
📝 Blog Post
📧 Professional Email
💬 Text Message
🐣 Explain Like I'm Five
📇 Outline
🐥 Twitter Thread
📱 TikTok Video Script
🧑‍💼 LinkedIn Post
📜 Transcript

This app is so simple and easy to use that a three-year-old can master it in seconds. Why waste time typing when you can just talk and let OASIS do the work? Try it out for yourself and see what everyone is raving about.

🔥 Download OASIS for iPhone 🔥

😍 People f’ing love OASIS

On Saturday, OASIS investor Packy McCormick tried the brand new app and tweeted about it, gushing praise.

With my permission, Packy included a link to our TestFlight. Almost instantly, people responded:

🤯 Note taking ?!

When I first laid my hands on that initial build of our iPhone app, I had this feeling deep down in my gut that we had really struck gold. But you know what? People, they never cease to amaze me. They didn't just use OASIS to create content for sharing, they actually started using it to take private notes!

🚀 Not the pivot we planned

In 2022, an unstoppable force (OASIS) hit an immovable object (Apple). We spent years trying to make our core technology actually work on Apple devices, but in December 2022, we had to face the fact that the Apple Silicon environment simply wasn't mature enough yet. Apple’s AI chipset floating point math calculations don’t conform to industry standards, and there’s nothing we can do to fix that.

Undeterred, we took a step back and decided to return to our roots as a mobile app, this time embracing the cloud and punting on real-time processing.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Our first mobile app, which we shipped in 2021, literally melted iPhones. It sounds like a joke, but it's not. But we didn't let that stop us either.

In January 2023, we made an even more radical pivot: speech-to-video. Our new AI avatars move in response to your speech instead of your on-camera movements. It was a game-changer, and our AI research team got right to work. Within 2 weeks, we had a proof-of-concept.

While I waited for AI research to be completed, I started to think about what else makes communicating through video difficult.

I decided to take matters into my own hands and prototype an app that would simplify the process of creating video scripts. It was just a small feature, something that I personally wanted to test, but as it turned out, it was exactly what we needed.

Our end is goal is connect all these pieces––and more––together in a powerful AI communication super app that lets you communicate effectively in any language (English, Spanish, Chinese, etc), in any medium (text, image, speech, video), just by talking naturally, like you would to a friend.

Universal human communication, powered by generative AI.

📱 Next Step: Launch on the  App Store

The obvious next step for OASIS is to launch our iPhone app on the  App Store. All our engagement metrics are going in the right direction.

ChatGPT just grew to 100M users in 2 months. Our timing is perfect.

OASIS mission is simple: to solve the problem human communication, just like our ancestors solved the problem of human hunger. And with the new OASIS app zooming toward public launch, we're one step closer to achieving that mission.

-Matt Mireles
Founder/CEO, OASIS

🔥 Download OASIS for  iPhone 🔥

Ask: Intro me to senior product designers

Highlights

Why Build When You Can Buy? Synthetic Voice edition 💸🔬

I cut a deal with Modulate.ai to license 6 different synthetic voice filters to put into the Oasis app. Modulate is a Boston-based startup founded by recent MIT grads. It’s a 2-part deal:

1. iOS SDK Access  –  $X <––we are here

2. Commercial License – $Y for 1st year. $Z/year thereafter. 

TBD if this will succeed. There’s a lot of technical risk.

Shaun & Louis are working on integrating into XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, which we suspect is going to be a huge PITA. Emil thinks the voice changing will create an unstoppable feedback loop. Personally, I’m eager to see it in action. ETA: 1 month. 

However, if Modulate’s technology actually works, then we just accelerated our product roadmap by K+ months for $N. That would cover a single deep learning engineer working just X months! 

This is the kind of bet I love to make: Huge upside, low downside. 

$NNNNN of Not Boring 💰

Packy McCormick, creator of Not Boring & GP at Not Boring Capital, just invested $N into Oasis. Packy & I totally riff off each other in conversation. Working with him is an absolute blast. I am very excited about this. 

Coming Soon: Data Center CapEx to Accelerate AI Research 💸 🏢 💽

Yousif is scoping out industrial spaces to build a small data center in SoCal. We budgeted $N CapEx for this project, but may come in substantially under that. Because we run AI research experiments constantly 24/7, buying state of the art GPU clusters is a MUCH better deal than renting them from AWS or even lower-cost Fluidstack. 

If you’re curious, I can go into more detail on the economic calculus of why––when it comes to GPUs––buying is better than renting. LMK in the comments. 

Discussion
Guerrilla Capital: VC meets DTC 💰📱💃

In the future, the world’s leading companies will apply modern community management techniques to investor relations. It sounds obvious when you think about it, but investor relations at most companies is totally antiquated when compared to their marketing departments. With the rise of AngelList syndicates, RUVs, Substack, TikTok, Reddit & Twitter, it is now possible to build asymmetric, one-way trust relationships with capital owners of all sizes at real scale.

With $1k RUVs, startups will always be fundraising, often via SEC-sanctioned public solicitation, which AngelList’s RUV product supports.

If people are going to invest without meeting you in Zoom, then they are going to want to follow you across time. The Club FOMO Substack is my new project to gain us an internet following of investors. I may even experiment with buying subscribers via targeted ads. I wonder how much a prospective investor costs to acquire!

The idea is for the content to be fun, authentic and––most importantly––interesting. We are pushing the actual boundaries of human communication & interaction. We have a truly interesting story to tell the world! We have the opportunity to create a new form of mass-market entertainment that combines the lean-back experience of TV with the your actual money on the line experience of Robinhood. Here’s what that looks like to start 

• Investors Only 🦄🚀 – XXXX members
  VIP club just for insiders to mingle with the team

• Club FOMO 😎🔥– YYYY members, growing NN% weekly
  window into the VIP club as corporate propaganda machine

If I’m right, these DTC IR efforts will give us a long-term edge in fundraising, recruiting, dealmaking & more. Why? Because we’ll have a guerrilla army of millions of engaged investors like you behind us. People who––against long odds––bet real money on our success.

I call it guerrilla capital. (Mao would be so proud!) 

Elon & WallStreetBets have demonstrated the power of guerrilla capital in the public markets. Now it’s time for us to shoot our shot.

Fantasy scenario: In the future, instead of raising a venture round from an institutional aggregator of capital, we raise money from our guerrilla army of fan & followers via RUV.

Key Metrics as of June 31, 2021

Cash in Bank: $XXM
Monthly Burn: $280k
Headcount: 6 FTEs
Runway at current burn: AA months
Runway at planned burn: BB months

What I’m Reading 📖 📺
The Metaverse Primer by Matthew Ball 

Alex Taub on Digital Horse Racing, Breeding & More – The Pomp Podcast

• blew my mind! 

Sexy Beasts on Netflix

• Oasis version coming soon?

Faces are the Next Target for Fraudsters

Game Over: Chinese Company Deploys Facial Recognition to Limit Youths’ Play

The Ethics of a Deepfake Anthony Bourdain Voice

Shoutouts 😘
David Weekly & Adam K. for introing me to awesome designers.

Peter Miller for writing a patent application that nailed it on the very first draft.

Ben Narasin for inviting me to your awesome house party!

Sundeep Ahuja, Cindy Bi & Chris Wake for inviting their LPs to Investors Only 🦄🚀

Siqi Chen for listening to all my crazy ideas. 

Happy birthdays Yousif, Shaun & Kristina!

Cheers!

-Matt

The video should start at the ~13min mark where they start talking about Oasis. I find it really interesting to hear their candid take on the company. It’s pretty cool to be able to get such honest, in-depth feedback & to see what they took away from the pitch.

Q for you: I’m thinking of writing a post “Is $65M Insane?“ where I interview investors we pitched in this last round and get their takes on the pricetag. Personally, I think it would be cool to hear from people who wanted to invest but choked on the price, choked on the price but eventually swallowed and even people who thought $65M was a great deal (and would have gladly paid $100M+). What do you think? Should I do it?

We’re hiring a founder-level Game Designer.

This is the perfect role for a startup founder with social game design experience who is interested in blockchain and wants to be part of a 🦄🚀.

1. Share on your preferred networks (eg Twitter, LinkedIn).

2. Send to anyone in your network who you think might be a good fit.

If we hire someone you refer, I will send you $5,000 in Bitcoin.

Create the Fantastic Future

Oasis is a synthetic video chat mobile app where you talk through a AI-generated avatar that looks like a real person & mirrors everything you do in real-time.

Your avatar could be you. Your avatar could be someone else. You avatar could be a custom-designed human face generated by a GAN. Call it deepfake. Call it sci fi come to life. Call it whatever you want.

Oasis is a synthetic video chat mobile app where you talk through a AI-generated avatar that looks like a real person & mirrors everything you do in real-time.

Your avatar could be you. Your avatar could be someone else. You avatar could be a custom-designed human face generated by a GAN. Call it deepfake. Call it sci fi come to life. Call it whatever you want.

In the Oasis, you exist as a pure personality. No one knows what you look or sound like. You have can video chat with complete privacy. You cannot be judged based on your appearance or voice, just your ideas & personality. Skin color, gender, good looks, weight, race, age –– all of it is a computer-generated fiction and none of it matters.

People come to the Oasis for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be. Tall, beautiful, scary, a different sex, a different species, live-action, cartoon. It’s all your call. - Ready Player One

Design the Unforgettable

We are hiring a Game Designer to lead design at Oasis. This is a collaborative founder-level role, not a junior job. You will be employee #7, working directly with the founders alongside a team of distinguished engineers, entrepreneurs & AI researchers.

Your job is to use the world's most advanced simulation technologies to design the world's most unforgettable, most compelling social game. At Oasis, we believe that life is a game. TikTok is as much a game as it is a social network as it is MTV for Gen Z. To us, the distinction between "game design" and social app design is not meaningful.

The ideal candidate is an experienced free-to-play game designer, gaming founder or social network founder with who understands the importance of designing products in a way that simultaneously meet the needs of the players and the needs of the game (or network). You must possess knowledge of all aspects of game design, from economy design to UI design to user flows to usability testing to user research to funnel analysis.

You will report directly to the CEO (product owner), ideating & executing new concepts together in a rapid, experimental manner. Eventually, you will build a design team around you.

Responsibilities

• Design unforgettable, inherently viral social games & experiences

• Analyze user data & use it to inform your designs

• Oversee user research & usability testing

• Collaborate directly with CEO on product design & UX

• Experiment a lot (and quickly)

Requirements

• Lead designer or founder of a video game (or social network)

• Ability to think at both the level of the system/economy and the level of the individual/player

• Owner mentality

• Growth mindset

Nice to Haves

• Interest in AI & blockchain technologies

To start, you will be the only full-time designer at Oasis. You will be asked to weigh in on engineering as well as product & business decisions. You will work directly with the founders and be expected contribute product ideas & quickly implement them. Your do-whatever-it-takes attitude & practical demeanor will set an example for the entire company. Plan to build a design team from scratch as the company scales.

Compensation

• Cash: $140 - 200k

• Equity: 1 - 3%

• Location: Remote within North America

• Vacation: Unlimited, minimum 2 weeks per year

• Benefits: Health & dental insurance, ~100% paid for by the company

The #1 thing we look for in candidates is intellectual fearlessness, evidence that you've done things that your resume says you shouldn't be able to do, things that would scare normal people from even trying.

On a Mission to Advance Human Communication

We aim, ultimately, to advance human communication beyond all of today's limitations and create a new form of democratic social organization in the cloud. Our success will be an evolutionary event for the human species, a byproduct of which will be immense wealth creation.

Our immediate goal is to create the world's fastest growing social game.

Oasis is backed by $7M+ from some of the most famous investors in Silicon Valley, including Naval, Cyan Banister, Matt Ocko, Leo Polovets, Founders Fund, the first investors in Skype & Zoom, the founder of Netflix, the founder of Black Lives Matter and various Midas Listers.

What we do touches so deeply at questions of identity. As such, we treat diversity & inclusion––gender, age, class, politics, ethnicity––as a strategic imperative. We are a heterogenous set of idealists, not ideologues.

Oasis was founded in 2019 as a remote-first company. Twice a year, we shut the entire company down and force everyone to take a 10-day vacation. Before the plague––and hopefully again soon––we got together in person at a travel destination (e.g. Jackson Hole) every ~6 weeks for 3-5 days at a time.

Expect intense creativity & a helluva good time along with high standards, hard work and minimal stupidity.

The only "press" coverage on Oasis that exists is this episode of the My First Million podcast, where ––unbeknownst to us––investors discuss the company.

Interested? Send a note to matt@theoasis.com that includes: - Your story - Why you think you'd be a good fit for this role - Your LinkedIn profile - Your design portfolio

Cash in Bank: $XXM
Monthly Burn: ~$120k
Headcount: 6 FTEs + 0.5 FT Contractor
Runway at current burn: YY months
Runway at planned burn: ZZ months

Highlights

Atypical leads Seed+ on $65M cap 

Atypical Ventures led a SAFE financing on a $65M cap / 10% discount. $2.9M is closed and another $1.2M is committed pending wires. Investors include:

• Marc Randolph (founder of Netflix)

• Matt Ocko (partner at Data Collective)

• Rob Stavis (partner at Bessemer)

• Greg Duffy (founder of Dropcam)

• Ken Hertz (connected Hollywood lawyer)

• Atypical Ventures (insider)

• Duro Ventures (insider)

• Rogue Capital (insider)

• Capital X (insider)

• Red Beard Ventures

I’ve stopped actively soliciting new investment and am switching my focus to product & hiring. That said, I do have a handful of conversations still in progress that might yield more cash. 

AngelList RUV FTW

We took in $361k from 42 investors and only added one line item to our cap table. How? By using AngelList’s new Rollup Vehicle product. I LOVE THIS PRODUCT. Made it so, so easy to take in individual checks from interesting angels, family, friends & even random angels I met at parties in Miami. Just email/text the person a link. 100% seamless. Cost the company an $8k setup fee, which was totally worth it. ***HIGHLY RECOMMEND****

Mandatory Vacation

We shut Oasis down for 10 days and forced everyone to go on vacation. I was even banned from posting on Slack. It was amazing. Now the whole team feels refreshed. 

The pandemic turned us into 24x7 workaholics. The team was always working late, always working weekends. The productivity was profound, but we started seeing signs of burnout a few months ago (eg with XXX’s sudden departure). In talking to the team, it was clear that we all needed a vacation.

Because of how tight we are as a team, we knew the only any one of us would actually be able take a vacation was if we all went on vacation simultaneously. If some people were still working, the temptation to check Slack, hop on email and generally not vacate would be too high. We care about each other & the company too much not to.

The experiment was a smashing success. I think we’re going to try to make this a company tradition. 

Knee Surgery (Finally!)

Remember how I blew out my knee skiing in February 2020 and wasn’t able to see a doctor until July? Well, I––finally––got ACL reconstruction surgery last Thursday. Now I’m constantly icing my knee, hobbling around and overall recovering more quickly than expected. Progress.

Lowlights

Not the $20M Series A I was hoping for

I was really thinking we’d raise $20M. Obviously, that did not happen and, tbh, I was a bit disappointed... until I talked to other founders who had fundraised recently. Lotta high fives when I told them the terms, so that made me feel better. Life is all a matter of perspective!

Clearly, the next step for us is to ship a product that gets traction, at which point I expect we’d be flooded with cash.

My biggest takeaway from this fundraise is to be more paranoid in general and less optimistic about the imaginative capacity of venture capitalists. 

I want to build a company that does not depend on venture capital for its life or success. Ironically, it will likely take more venture capital to get Oasis to the point where fundraising is an optional activity. But the last 3 months have left me with a deep desire to make stuff that prints money and doesn’t require the belief or permission of investors to survive. 

Next Up

Ship Product in 90 Days

With fundraising complete, our focus is now on shipping a product. The goal is to have an app on the App Store within 90 days. We’re working on synthesizing all our learnings this (inc some formal UX research) and finalizing a direction within the next 1-2 weeks. 

More to come on this soon...

What I’m Reading

A new study suggests that “Zoom fatigue” is worse for women than men

• note: We’ve been saying this at Oasis since 2019

Meet Miko. She’s a virtual streamer who doesn’t show her face.

Balaji on Avatars, Crypto & more (the Tim Ferriss podcast)

How Pixar uses hyper colors to hack your brain

Is content moderation a dead end?

 ***

Ideas? Feedback? I’d love to hear ‘em. Email me back directly or book a time to chat.

Cheers!

-Matt

📧 Expect 0-4 emails per month.

At Oasis, our mission is to advance human communication beyond all limitations. Our success will result in an evolutionary event for the human species, the byproduct of which will be immense wealth creation for all involved.

Subscribe for visions of a fantastic future, real-talk about business, technology deep-dives and opportunities to get involved.

If you’re an existing Oasis investor, ping me for an invite to Investors Only 🦄 🚀 , our exclusive newsletter for Oasis insiders.

Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.

P.S. If you invest in startups, join my Guerrilla Capital syndicate on AngelList. In the past, I’ve syndicated investments in Oasis & other startups improving life for the bottom 99%.

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In the meantime, tell your friends!