A year of operations,
organized in an afternoon.
The NC IDEA Tweener Fund had a year’s worth of processes scattered across Drive, PDFs, emails, and sticky notes, with a new hire on the way. Here’s how the assistant turned it all into a shared team space in an afternoon.
- ~1 hr
- to organize an operation that had sat undone for over a year
- 6 min
- to build a project plan that would have taken a week by hand
- ~50
- tasks auto-created across 9 sections from one PDF
A year of knowledge stuck in one person's head
The Triangle Tweener Fund is merging with NC IDEA as it grows, and the team was beginning to hire someone to help run all of their operations. Rachel, the previous person in charge, was trying to figure out the quickest way to get all of her knowledge out of her head and into a spot where this new person could see it.
Google Drive existed, obviously, but digging through documents, trying to figure out what to do next, and understanding the context on relationships from just a random Drive wasn’t going to cut it. Their information lived across various sources: in Drive, in event-plan PDFs, and in emails, Slacks, texts, and thoughts on sticky notes. They wanted it turned into an interactive database of task management, notes, and resources that could easily be passed on and referenced by the new hire.
I have a task here that’s from April of 2025 that says to update the planning document for the Tweener awards. From 2025. I haven’t filled out the planning document from over a year ago. Because it’s too much damn work to get all the stuff in one spot and to list it all out.
They wanted the system. Nobody had time to build it.
Rachel had known about Elephants for a while, but in the past she basically would have had to sit down and manually create her projects, her sections, her notes, and her new people. It was a process she kept pushing off because she just did not have the time.
This was a problem we’d observed at a number of small teams: they wanted the organization, they wanted the task management, they wanted the notes, but they didn’t have a person whose dedicated job it was to set all that up. The one person who could just didn’t have the time to actually do it.
An assistant that could read anything
The timing was perfect. We released the new version of the assistant in the app. It could process anything (Google Docs, PDFs, emails) and turn it into structured projects, relationships, and notes, all organized by the assistant so a staff member like Rachel doesn’t have to think about a thing.
Rachel launched her Tweener team, opened the assistant, and began brain-dumping all of her PDFs, her spreadsheets, and her long emails about event plans. She watched as the assistant constructed projects, pulled in sections, added notes, and created recurring tasks, following everything she had in her documents and turning it into a workable, usable space for both onboarding the new hire and organizing company operations.
Setting up recurring tasks from a PDF
Rachel had several recurring tasks the team completed every month, week, or bi-weekly. She just wrote them into a PDF, sent them over to Elephants, and it set up an operations project for her.
An entire event playbook, rebuilt from an old doc
Rachel runs a really large event called “Tweener Madness,” and she had a somewhat out-of-date planning document for it that she uploaded into Elephants. The assistant created a project with nine specific sections, notes for each section referring to the important information for each area, and almost 50 tasks across the entire project.
Raw email and calendar text, in. A full project, out.
Rachel had a weekly task for the Tweener Talks podcast, with all the info about what to do kept inside her calendar and her emails. She just copy-pasted out all the text, dumped it in raw, and watched as Elephants created the entire project for her.
You literally just did it all in six minutes. That would have taken me a week to do.
The first 48 hours with a new hire
Onboarding the new employee, Gina, 48 hours later was made significantly easier by the existence of the Elephants space. All of their processes, upcoming tasks, and the weird quirks of how things were done now lived in a database that Gina could simply text to understand more about.
Gina’s tasks surfaced in a nice, clean little spot for her to see. And again, if she had questions about how to do something, she could just send the Elephants assistant a message to figure it out. Since then, Rachel and Gina have been using the platform to manage everything related to the Tweener Fund, and it’s been going smoothly.
Friction points: what didn't work well
In terms of friction points, the biggest issue this team ran into was a few small bugs related to recurring tasks. Since Elephants is still early software, there were a few issues around things like recurring task frequency and how recurring tasks behaved after being completed. Those have since been fixed entirely.
One of the other friction points was actually knowing where to start with planning a project. But the assistant made this extremely easy once they asked it for help.
Another reason I waited so long to do this is because I had all of the pieces for the project but I didn’t really know how to organize them in a way that made sense and could be an actionable list. I just speech-to-texted the entire project — what it was about, what I did, and the important things I learned — and it just figured it out for me. Not knowing how to start was a huge hurdle that doesn’t exist anymore.
The situation now
With all of the information in the platform now, Gina and Rachel can simply send messages to the assistant to get info about how things are done, what was done when, who did what, who’s responsible for what, contacts, and organizations. Anything related to these large projects is searchable by the AI agent inside Elephants.
- how things are done
- what was done when
- who did what
- who's responsible for what
- contacts
- organizations
Creating and organizing new projects is as simple as voice-dumping their thoughts into the assistant and getting the projects, sections, tasks, and notes made for them, or added to the appropriate spots within the existing team space. Hours are saved getting things done instead of digging around for information, and procedures are documented so transitions with new team members move smoothly, without losing the important information that was traditionally stored tribally.
We threw Gina in the deep end and had her attend an NC IDEA Ecosystem meeting on her second day. She was able to text the app new people she met and then the tasks she had for those people. She said it really helped her not feel as overwhelmed.
A mountain that became a molehill
Getting an entire team organized and documented, something that floated around as an insurmountable mountain of a “must do” for months in Rachel’s head, became a molehill that took about an hour to handle. Rachel just mass-dumped any files and context she had on the way things were done for the Tweener Fund, and the assistant pulled it all together into an ultra-organized, easy-to-use space.
Give your team a shared memory.
We’re onboarding small teams weekly. Tell us about yours and we’ll be in touch.