I went to get an apple yesterday from our kitchen. It was a Golden apple, which is the kind that my kids love. And like every apple I've gotten for the past few decades, it had a little sticker on it. You know the one. That tiny PLU code label that helps the cashier ring it up faster.

I peeled it off without thinking. It stuck to my thumb. I flicked it toward the trash. Missed. It's probably still on my kitchen floor somewhere.

And here's the thing: I didn't think twice about it.

When Did We Stop Questioning the Sticker?

The first barcode was scanned at a checkout counter on June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The product? A pack of Wrigley's chewing gum. By the 1980s, barcodes were everywhere—revolutionizing retail, speeding up checkout lines, and changing how we shop.

But fresh produce? That was trickier. You can't print a barcode on a banana or stamp one on a tomato. So somewhere along the way, likely in the late 1980s and early 1990s, someone came up with the PLU (Price Look-Up) sticker system. Suddenly, every apple, pear, and mango had its own little label.

At first, I'm sure people noticed. "Why is there a sticker on my fruit?" But over time, we just... stopped asking. The stickers became part of the landscape. Part of the routine.

But we don't question it anymore. We've habituated.

Tony Fadell and the Art of Noticing

Tony Fadell is one of the guys who created the iPod and the Nest Thermostat. He gave a TED Talk about this exact phenomenon back in 2015. He calls it "habituation," and he uses the fruit sticker as his go-to example.

His point? The first secret of great design is noticing what we've stopped noticing.

When something is new, whether it's a sticker on fruit or a new process at work, we're hyper-aware of it. It's annoying, awkward, or just plain weird. But over time, our brains adapt. We stop seeing it. We accept it as "just the way things are."

And that's dangerous. Because once we stop noticing, we stop questioning. And once we stop questioning, we stop innovating.

So What Are YOU Not Noticing Anymore?

I'll tell you what I think a lot of municipal clerks have stopped noticing: the absurd amount of time it takes to do meeting minutes.

Think about it. When you first became a clerk, meeting minutes were overwhelming. Learning the format, capturing every motion, making sure you didn't miss any important details. I'm sure it was a lot. But over time, you developed a system. You got faster. You found your rhythm.

And now? Now it's just what you do. Three, five or even eight hours per meeting spent transcribing, formatting, reviewing, finalizing. Late nights after council meetings. Weekends catching up. It's exhausting, but you're used to it.

You've habituated.

The ChatGPT Moment

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. Within two months, it hit 100 million users and became the fastest-growing consumer app in internet history.

I remember the moment I first played with it. I was blown away. This wasn't just another tech tool. This was something that could fundamentally change how we work.

And I immediately thought: What could we build for Municipal Clerks?

A Conversation That Changed Everything

Andrei Igna and I were sitting around the HeyGov office one day, just chatting about possibilities. We'd both been experimenting with ChatGPT and using it to brainstorm ideas, improve our writing, refine our thinking, and using it as an alternative to doing Google searches. The usual stuff.

But the more we played with it, the more we read how it was a Large Language Model (LLM), and what they're capable of. It's built to understand, process, and generate text. And if there's one place where language and documentation are absolutely critical, it's local government.

We started thinking: given what ChatGPT can do with language, there must be something it would be ideal for inside municipal operations.

And that's when it clicked.

Through running Town Web, we were deeply familiar with the rhythms of municipal work. We knew that clerks are regularly posting agendas, agenda packets, meeting minutes. Week after week, meeting after meeting. It's a never-ending cycle of documentation.

We didn't need to hear about this pain point over and over from clerks. We already knew it was a challenge because we saw it firsthand. We watched clerks scramble to get agendas posted 24 hours before their meeting. We saw how Clerks were sometimes overwhelmed by doing their meeting minutes. We saw the backlog. We understood the pressure.

And we thought: if ChatGPT is a Large Language Model designed to work with text…maybe, just maybe…it could help streamline the process of how meeting minutes are created!

The eureka moment hit when Andrei built a very basic prototype over that weekend. Nothing super fancy. The early version of ChatGPT could only handle 8,000 tokens, which wasn't enough to process a one-house council meeting, but it was proof of concept to see if the technology could actually handle the unique structure and language of municipal meetings. And it worked. Not perfectly, but well enough to know we were onto something.

Getting Serious About Solving the Problem

That early prototype was promising, but I knew we needed to go deeper. We needed to really understand the day-to-day challenges clerks face, not just assume we knew what they needed.

In late 2023, the Greater Green Bay Chamber in Northeast, Wisconsin was running their BuildUp accelerator, which was a tech accelerator program designed to help startups refine their products and go to market. Around that time, I was connected with Matthew Kee from Tundra Angels, a local VC group in Green Bay. Matthew referred me to the BuildUp program, and I enrolled.

That accelerator changed everything. It forced me to get 100% focused on the needs of municipal clerks. Not what I thought they needed, but what they actually needed.

And I was in a unique position to find out. Since I was already running Town Web — a web agency that serves local governments — I had direct access to dozens of potential users. I could pick up the phone and talk to clerks I'd been working with for years. I could ask them: What does your day look like? Where are the bottlenecks? What keeps you up at night?

I also started reaching out on LinkedIn to clerks I didn't know yet. I wanted to hear from people in different states, different sized municipalities, different governance structures. I wanted to understand how their daily needs were being met—or more often, not being met.

And our hunch was right: meeting minutes were eating their lives.

Building ClerkMinutes

That's how ClerkMinutes was born. Not from a tech-first mindset of "let's build something cool with AI," but from a problem-first approach: "How do we give clerks back their time?"

We took the power of AI—specifically, the kind of natural language processing that makes ChatGPT so impressive—and applied it directly to the workflow of municipal clerks. The result is a tool that takes meeting recordings and automatically generates structured, accurate, compliant meeting minutes.

No more hours of transcription. No more late nights formatting. Just upload your recording, and let the AI do the heavy lifting.

But here's what I learned through that accelerator program, and what I want to share with you: The hardest part wasn't building the technology. The hardest part was getting people to notice the problem again.

Using AI in the Clerk World

One thing we've discovered as we've worked with clerks across the country is that many of them have habituated to the pain. They've accepted that meeting minutes just take a long time. That it's "part of the job." That "this is how it's always been done."

And I get it. Change is hard. New technology can be intimidating. And when you've spent years perfecting a system that works—even if it's exhausting—it's scary to try something different.

But here's my challenge to you, the same challenge Tony Fadell gives to designers:

Notice again.

Notice the hours you're spending. Notice the stress. Notice the other projects that get pushed to the back burner because you're still working on last week's minutes. Notice the time you could be spending on strategic initiatives, community engagement, or—radical thought—going home at a reasonable hour.

The fruit sticker has been there for 30+ years, and we still haven't figured out a better way. (Though some companies are now experimenting with laser-etching PLU codes directly onto fruit—finally!)

But your meeting minutes process? That doesn't have to stay stuck in 1995.

The World Has Changed. Your Tools Should Too.

ChatGPT went from zero to 100 million users in two months. GPT-3 was released in 2020. GPT-4 came out in March 2023. The technology is evolving faster than any of us can keep up with.

And while AI isn't perfect, and it never will be, it's really, really good at certain tasks. Like transcription. Like formatting. Like taking hours of meeting audio and turning it into structured, readable minutes.

That's what ClerkMinutes does. It doesn't replace you. It doesn't eliminate the need for a clerk's expertise, judgment, and oversight. But it gives you back your time.

Stop Accepting the Sticker

I still have that Golden apple sticker somewhere on my kitchen floor. And I'll probably keep dealing with them for years to come.

But you don't have to keep dealing with 5+ hour meeting minute marathons.

You don't have to accept that "this is just how it is."

You can notice. You can question. You can change.

Because the first secret of great design, and great work, is noticing what you've stopped noticing.

And once you notice? You can't un-see it.

So here's my question for you: What are you ready to stop accepting?