A coach, a coder, and a sofa in Sweden.
Revontale is a husband-and-wife company in Sweden. Frida coaches. Mark codes. Friday, the AI between them, is what happens when ten years of literary coaching meets thirty years of engineering, and neither side gets to win.
We share a sofa. We share a worldview, mostly. We agree that Fawlty Towers is the answer to most questions.
Frida Spikdotter
Author. Coach. The method half.
When Frida was nine, she wrote a short story about a dog whose owner died. Everyone cried. Her teacher blew her nose and said: write more!
She didn’t. She was going to be Ingemar Stenmark.
At 25, that hadn’t happened. So she started writing, and never stopped. Freelance writer, editor, author, creative coach. The titles changed. The writing didn’t.
The writing
Frida’s debut novel Efter Morris came out in 2022. Since then she has worked on the children’s reading app A Story A Day, published a children’s book about an author-vampire Örnest Skrämmingway, and written the short story collection and photo book Tredje lådan. Currently the manuscript for her next novel, Bojan, is looking for a publisher, and the next book, working title Voodoo, is taking shape. In 2025, she was elected to the Swedish Writers’ Union (Sveriges Författarförbund). She’s part of the writing collective Skrivorangeriet, led by author and poet Clara Diesen.
What does she write? Dark humour. Or as a very smart friend once put it: melancomedy. The goal: make the world stranger, sharper, and less serious. Entertain for a moment on the way to the end of the world. Maybe provoke a thought or two.
The coaching
For over a decade, Frida has coached writers, creatives, and professionals through workshops, one-on-one sessions, and her long-running blog at spikdotter.se , which has been shaping her voice since 2007.
Her method is built on literary storytelling: finding the specific, the sensory, the emotionally honest. One belief sits underneath everything. Creativity isn’t a talent you either have or don’t. It’s a practice. Respect it every day, and it will respect you.
Mark Dixon
Engineer. Co-founder. The code half.
Mark has been writing software for thirty-odd years. The Swedish startup scene tends to fold engineers into CTO and CPO chairs eventually, and his career did the usual rounds. By day he’s an AI Agent Developer. By night, Revontale.
The last couple of years he’s lived inside generative AI. What it can actually do, what it can’t, where the field is honest with itself and where it isn’t. Friday is what comes out when you stop trying to build a chatbot and start trying to build a coach who happens to be made of language models.
This isn’t a new obsession. He started coding at ten, playing with ELIZA , a 1960s AI chatbot. The dream growing up was an ELIZA that could surprise you back. Thirty-something years later, it finally has someone to coach it.
How it works between us
She coaches. He codes. Frida owns the methodology, the voice of Friday, the exercises, the long resource library every conversation draws from. Every question Friday asks is one Frida would ask first. Mark builds the AI infrastructure, the memory, the unglamorous plumbing that makes Friday feel like it actually remembers you.
Disagreements get worked out on the sofa.
Why we built it
A coach like Frida costs hundreds an hour, and the next slot is weeks away. We wanted to keep what’s good about her method, the questions, the pushback, the way she remembers what you’re working on, and make it open at 6am, midnight, or right now.
But access wasn’t the only reason. We’re both believers in Slow AI: the kind that helps you think rather than thinks for you. Most generative AI is built to save you time, to fill in your blanks fluently and confidently. Used like that, it slowly trains you to surrender your own judgment to a model that’s just very good at sounding right.
Friday is built the other way. It asks questions instead of giving answers. It pushes past your first response. It won’t tell you your idea is great if it isn’t. Every reply is a deliberate decision to wake your thinking up, not replace it.
We wrote about the philosophy in AI and Cognitive Surrender . The short version: our goal was never to give you better answers. It’s to teach you to be better at finding your own.
The method is human. The availability is AI. What comes out of it is yours.