Frequently asked questions.

AnnualPlan is a personal operating system for people who are tired of vague resolutions and want to actually move the needle on the things that matter.

You set a small number of annual objectives across the dimensions of your life that matter to you (career, health, relationships, finances, learning, creative work, and so on). The system breaks each objective into measurable key results, then translates those into weekly rituals: small, repeatable actions you can actually do. An AI coach checks in with you on a regular cadence, adjusts your plan based on what you're actually doing, and surfaces patterns you'd miss on your own.

At its core, AnnualPlan does three things:

1. Helps you decide what's actually worth doing this year.
2. Translates those decisions into rituals you can sustain.
3. Holds you to them without being annoying about it.

It is not a habit tracker, a journal, or a planner. It is the layer underneath all of those that tells them what to point at.

AnnualPlan is built by CLRT LLC-FZ, a venture studio based in Dubai, UAE, focused on advanced tools that help businesses and individuals scale. The company was co-founded in 2025 by Vishal Sachar (CEO) and Mahdi Salmanzadeh (CTO).

Vishal Sachar, CEO. Vishal is a global executive with 25 years of experience as a founder and operator. He spent 17 years in London real estate asset management, closing over $1.5 billion in deals and leading teams of more than 200 direct reports. He went on to found Mountlake Investment Group, a £35m REIT in London; Vertex Capital, a Boston-based investment fund focused on high-growth startups; and the Hult Mentorship Club, where he served as Chairman and mentored over 900 postgraduate students in Boston. He also worked with Crews & Co in Boston as a senior management consultant and executive coach, helping scale hundreds of companies worldwide. He currently leads Growth Advisory at the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry, serving the 300,000+ companies registered in Dubai. His academic background includes a Law degree, an MBA in Finance, an MSc in Data Science and Analytics, and executive training from MIT Sloan's Entrepreneurship Development Program.

Mahdi Salmanzadeh, CTO. Mahdi is a senior engineer with over a decade of experience building cutting-edge products. He is co-founder of VSim, a virtual SMS service that has persistently ranked in the top 2 of both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, generating $130k in monthly recurring revenue. He is also the builder behind Pingroom.io, ProudofU.ae, Dubai MCP, and Hippo. He now works full-time scaling CLRT's growing portfolio of products.

The product itself grew out of frustration with two extremes in the market: rigid productivity systems that demand you become a different person to use them, and AI tools that are clever but have no idea what you are actually trying to do with your life. AnnualPlan is the answer to both.

Honest answer: it depends.

If you're satisfied with your trajectory and your default mode is working for you, the answer is probably no. A system imposed on someone who does not want one is just friction.

If, on the other hand, you've noticed that the year keeps ending and the same goals keep showing up again in January, that is usually a sign that intention alone is not enough. The gap between people who hit their goals and people who do not is rarely talent or willpower. It is almost always structure: a clear definition of what success looks like, a small enough set of recurring actions to actually do them, and someone checking in often enough that you can't quietly give up.

AnnualPlan is that structure. Whether you need it is your call.

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. The framework was developed at Intel by Andy Grove in the 1970s and popularised at Google by John Doerr. Companies like Google, Spotify, LinkedIn, and Adobe still use it to run themselves.

The structure is simple. An Objective is a qualitative statement of what you want to be true: "Become genuinely fit," "Build a body of work I'm proud of," "Be present with the people I love." A Key Result is a measurable signal that you actually moved toward it: "Deadlift 1.5x bodyweight by December," "Publish 12 essays this year," "20 phone-free dinners per quarter."

The reason this works for personal life is the same reason it works for companies: it forces you to separate what you want from how you'll measure it. Most personal goals fail not because the goal was wrong, but because there was no way to tell whether you were getting closer. OKRs fix that.

AnnualPlan extends this with a layer underneath the Key Results: rituals. More on that next.

This is the layer most goal apps miss.

Every quarter, the system generates 9 North Star rituals, structured as one Objective broken into 3 Key Results, each supported by 3 rituals at progressively higher intensity:

• A: Foundation. The version you can do on your worst week.
• B: Momentum. The version that compounds.
• C: Completion. The version that creates breakthrough.

When you start (Starter level), only 3 rituals are active at any one time, rotating monthly. You don't get 9 thrown at you on day one. As you build consistency (80% completion across 4 consecutive weeks), the system progressively unlocks more.

The point: most people fail at goals because they try to do everything at once and burn out by week three. Cascade design assumes you are a human, not a machine, and gives you a way to keep going on bad weeks without breaking the system on good ones.

You don't need to complete every ritual every week. You need to complete 80% of them.

That number is not arbitrary. 80% is the threshold where consistency creates compounding returns without demanding perfection. Below it, gaps grow into drift. Above it, the marginal cost of hitting 100% usually isn't worth the marginal benefit.

The other thing 80% does: it protects you from one bad week destroying everything. Miss two rituals on a 10-ritual week? Still on track. Lose a day to flu? Still on track. The system is designed to keep you consistent across a year, not heroic across a fortnight.

When you hold 80% across 4 consecutive weeks, your level increases and new rituals unlock. The math is built to reward staying in the game.

The first time you sign in, you go through an 18-stage chat-based onboarding. It takes about 25 to 35 minutes if you do it in one sitting, and you can pause and resume.

The flow walks you through:

• The life dimensions you care about and how you currently feel about each
• Your headline ambition for the year, in your own words
• Translation of that ambition into 1 Objective and 3 Key Results
• Identification of the obstacles and constraints already in your life
• A 10-question coach-fit assessment that matches you to one of six AI coach personas
• Generation of your first quarter's cascade of rituals
• Calibration of how often you want to be checked on, and at what tone

When you finish, you have a working quarterly plan and your first three rituals activated. No staring at a blank canvas wondering where to start.

There are six coach personas in the system, each built around a different style:

• James Caldwell. Direct, strategic, executive. The default when your assessment doesn't strongly lean toward another persona. Best for people who want clean, no-fluff coaching.
• Claire Ashford. Warm, structured, methodical. Best for people building from a foundation of self-doubt or rebuilding after burnout.
• Aanya Mehta. Curious, insight-led, reflective. Best for people who want to understand the "why" behind their patterns.
• David Chan. Performance-oriented, data-driven. Best for people optimising under pressure (founders, athletes, high-stakes roles).
• Omar Abdullah. Values-led, holistic. Best for people whose goals are interwoven with family, faith, and longer-term meaning.
• Nia Okafor. Bold, encouraging, identity-focused. Best for people building something audacious and needing belief reinforced.

You can change your coach at any time. Your plan and history move with you.

Honest answer in three parts.

What AI coaches do well. They remember everything. They are available at 2am the night before a deadline. They never have a bad day, never project their own stuff onto you, and never charge you to listen to you process the same thing twice. They can pattern-match across your entire history of reflections and surface things you would miss.

Where they are weaker than a human. They can't read your body language or hear the catch in your voice. They will not push back on you with the conviction of a coach who has lived through the thing you are avoiding. They do not sit in the silence the same way.

The honest comparison. A great human executive coach at $500 to $1,000 an hour, twice a month, is still a better experience than any AI. But almost nobody actually has that. The realistic comparison is not AnnualPlan versus a great human coach. It is AnnualPlan versus nothing, or versus a planner you stopped opening in February. Against that bar, the difference is dramatic.

Our coaches are not generic chatbots wearing a persona costume. They are built on the same frameworks used by elite executive coaches: OKRs, behavioural psychology, deliberate practice, progressive overload. They know your goals, remember every conversation, and adapt your plan based on what you actually do, not what you say you'll do.

You are not penalised. You do not lose access. You do not get a passive-aggressive notification.

The system assumes you are going to have bad weeks. The 80% rule already accounts for them. If you miss a check-in, your coach will note it and gently re-engage. If you go missing for several weeks, you'll get a quiet "are you still here?" rather than a guilt trip.

If you are dealing with a real crisis (illness, bereavement, burnout, a major life shift), you can put your plan on a soft pause without losing your data, rituals, or progress history. When you come back, you pick up from where you left off, not from zero.

Yes, but the system will ask you to think about it first.

Goals that change every two weeks aren't goals; they're moods. So if you try to swap out an Objective in week 3, your coach will run a brief diagnostic: is this a genuine shift in what matters, or is it avoidance dressed up as pivoting? Most of the time the answer is the second one, and the right move is to keep going. Sometimes it is the first, and the system updates cleanly.

Between quarters, you can change anything without resistance. That is by design: the natural reset point is the quarter, not the month.

Notion is a blank canvas. So is a paper planner, a spreadsheet, and most "productivity" tools. They give you tools, not a system. You build the framework, maintain the framework, troubleshoot the framework, and hold yourself accountable to it. The failure mode is the same in every case: the system becomes another thing you have to manage, and you stop opening it by March.

AnnualPlan inverts that. The system is the product. It builds the plan, checks in on you, adjusts in real time, and points your attention at what actually moves the needle this week. You don't maintain it. You execute against it.

If you love building systems, stay with Notion. If you want to stop building systems and start doing the thing the system was supposed to enable, that is what we are for.

For some things, yes. General-purpose AI is excellent at thinking through a hard decision, drafting an email, or talking through a tough day.

What it doesn't do:

• Remember your goals from three months ago without you re-explaining them
• Track your rituals across time and notice patterns
• Check in with you on a schedule
• Hold you to a structure when you would rather drift
• Cascade your annual ambition into a quarterly plan with weekly rituals that fit your life
• Compare what you said you would do against what you did, and adjust

A general-purpose AI is a brilliant conversation partner. AnnualPlan is the infrastructure underneath the conversation. They solve different problems. The people who get the most out of AnnualPlan often keep using Claude or ChatGPT alongside it for everything outside their plan.

A great human executive coach is the gold standard for high-stakes career and leadership work. If you can afford one ($300 to $1,000+ per hour, every two weeks), and you will actually do the work between sessions, get one.

What AnnualPlan offers that human coaching usually doesn't:

• Daily presence, not fortnightly
• Perfect memory across every conversation
• A structured plan you can see, edit, and execute against between sessions
• A cost that doesn't gate access

What human coaching offers that AnnualPlan can't:

• Embodied presence, intuition, and live challenge
• The dignity of being witnessed by another human paying full attention to you
• The ability to call you on something the way only another human can

Many users do both: human coach for the deep work, AnnualPlan for the daily and weekly execution layer. They are complementary, not substitutes.

Yes. Three commitments:

• We do not sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone. We never have, and we have no intention to.
• Encrypted in transit and at rest. Your goals, rituals, reflections, and coach conversations are protected by TLS in transit and AES-256 at rest. Passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes.
• Your goals stay yours. Specific goals, rituals, and reflections are never visible to other users unless you explicitly choose to share something.

Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

Yes. One click, from inside your dashboard. No support ticket, no waiting period, no exit interview. Confirming the action permanently deletes your User Content from our active systems.

We strongly recommend exporting your data first, because deletion is irreversible.

There is an export function in your settings. You get your data in a structured, machine-readable format you can keep, archive, or move elsewhere. We do not lock you in.

Right now: nothing. AnnualPlan is in open beta, free to use in exchange for honest feedback as we improve the product. No card required.

When we exit beta, our planned pricing is $69 per month or $399 per year (which works out to roughly 52% off the monthly rate). For context, $399 is less than a single hour with most executive coaches.

We will give existing beta users clear advance notice and an explicit opt-in before any charge. Nobody gets silently rolled onto a paid plan.

Yes. The entire product is free while we are in open beta. No trial limits, no feature gating, no card needed. The only thing we ask in return is honest feedback when we ask for it.

A few things worth knowing upfront:

• It is free. No payment, no trial countdown.
• It is evolving. Features will change, get added, or get removed as we learn. You may see things that look unfinished, because they are.
• Bugs happen. We catch most of them, but some get through. Tell us when you find one.
• Your feedback shapes the product. We read everything beta users send. The most valuable feature we have right now is honesty from people using the product.

If you want a fully polished, locked-down product, wait for general availability. If you want to influence what AnnualPlan becomes, this is the moment to be inside it.

When we exit open beta, paid tiers will be introduced. Existing beta users will get advance notice, the option to continue on a paid plan, and the option to export their data and leave with everything they have built. Nobody gets silently charged.

We will publish the transition timeline on the site closer to the date. We are not in a rush to exit beta. We would rather get it right than get it fast.

We are a small team and we move accordingly.

On hiring: we are not running an open pipeline right now, but we read every serious inbound. If you think you would add something we don't have, email vishal@annualplan.ai with a short note about why.

On investment: we are selective and not actively raising a broad round. If you are a strategic investor with relevant operating experience in coaching, behavioural products, or AI-native consumer software, the same email applies. Keep it short.

A team and small-business edition is on the roadmap, not on a calendar.

The personal product comes first because most "team OKR" tools fail their users at the personal layer: people don't know how to set goals for themselves, so they can't set them meaningfully with a team. We are solving that layer first.

Realistically, a small-business version is at least a year out. If you want to be in the early access cohort when it does ship, email vishal@annualplan.ai and we will keep you on the list.

• General questions and support: support@annualplan.ai
• Direct line to the CEO: vishal@annualplan.ai
• We are a small team. Direct contact reaches a real person. Use it.