about
Who makes this, and how it was arrived at.
the maker
Jeremy Foxx
Product strategist & engineer
Twelve years scaling products and leading teams across industrial, fintech and mission-driven work — engineering into product management at IDEX, then product operations and consulting. The through-line is systems: treating a company as interconnected people, process and capital, where behaviour usually reflects how something was designed rather than who was at fault.
That belief is why this product exists in the shape it does. A writer with three abandoned manuscripts is not an undisciplined writer. They are a person doing continuity, research and plot bookkeeping by hand, in their head, for months, and running out of road before the drafting gets its turn. That is a design problem, and design problems have fixes.
“The board's job isn't to run the company — but to make sure the right outcomes are inevitable.” The same instinct runs through Zibaldi: it isn't here to write your book. It's here to make finishing it the likely outcome.
the studio
Foxxception
Zibaldi is built at Foxxception — a one-person practice, deliberately. No agency, no junior developers, no account manager between you and the person who wrote the code. The work is product strategy and engineering together: validate the idea, tighten the scope, and build the things that actually matter before writing a line.
For clients that means MVPs in weeks rather than months, daily progress, and full ownership of the source with no vendor lock-in. For Zibaldi it means the support address reaches the person who can fix the thing you are writing about — which is the only reason a small inbox is a feature rather than an apology.
methodology
Five commitments, and what each one costs us.
- 01
We read before we built
Zibaldi did not start from a feature list. It started from a corpus of 307 recorded conversations with working writers — novelists, journalists, biographers — mined into 230 filed findings about how books actually get made. The workspace, the workflows and the coaching are all downstream of that reading, not of a product meeting.
- 02
The research lives in the product, not just behind it
Those findings are not background material we absorbed and moved on from. They ship. When the app asks whether your premise survives in one sentence, or suggests you pose a question and delay the answer, it names the writer who said it and shows you where. Guidance that can't cite itself doesn't go in.
- 03
The AI takes the bookkeeping, never the sentences
Research, continuity, plotting, capture, the audit — those are the hours that get between a writer and the page, and they are what we automate. Drafting is not on the table. At its default setting the assistant is structurally incapable of producing prose for your book; that is a dial position, not a promise about restraint.
- 04
Your words are yours, and stay that way
Nothing you write trains a model — contractually, not as a policy-page sentiment. Your manuscript is written to your own device first and syncs after, so drafting works offline and the copy on your machine is real. Version history exists partly so you can prove your own authorship if you are ever asked to.
- 05
There is no correct way to write
After forty-plus interviews David Perell concluded there are as many ways to write as ways to live, and we took that as a design constraint rather than a nice line. Discovery writers get no outline anywhere. Planners get a design space that can mature for months. Nothing is locked, and nothing in the product implies one path is the mature one.
contact
A real person reads these.
- support@zibaldi.com
- Anything about using Zibaldi — bugs, accounts, questions.
- privacy@zibaldi.com
- Your data: what we hold, corrections, export, deletion.
- legal@zibaldi.com
- Legal notices, licensing, attribution enquiries.
Zibaldi is early software and the inbox is small, which is the good version of that problem — write and you will get an answer, not a ticket number.