Instinct's 10% a day bet: a phone, not an app

Instinct's founder told Invest Like The Best his phone-based personal assistant is growing 10% a day and handling $1B in annualized transactions.

Person texting personal AI assistant on phone
Invest Like the Best

Instinct went on Invest Like The Best to talk about the simplest idea in AI, and the hardest to pull off: a personal assistant that just works. It's growing 10% a day.

There's no app. That is the point.

Inside the Personal AI Assistant Growing 10% a Day | Instinct Founder - Invest Like the Best
Inside the Personal AI Assistant Growing 10% a Day | Instinct Founder, Invest Like the Best

The founder started Instinct about a year ago, building it around a phone number, a computer and an email address instead of a new interface. You text it, you call it, it calls you. He said it has only called him three times in months, but when it does, it's because a document needs a signature by 3 p.m. and it is 2:55 and it will push the email to the top of your inbox. On that Invest Like The Best appearance, he said early traction comes from transaction volume, approaching over a billion dollars a year on a very small, invite-only user base, with about 50% from travel alone, and from oddly specific uses like scanning an entire wardrobe and your body to generate outfits on your likeness, then ordering them, or connecting a bank account, finding forgotten subscriptions and canceling them end to end.

The newest piece is instinct-to-instinct. Launched about ten days ago, it lets two assistants talk directly to find meeting times instead of the usual back and forth. He called it a trusted person network with weighted permissions, so a spouse might get everything and a colleague might get only calendar and parts of inbox. He described the social friction too, if someone probes beyond what you allowed, your Instinct will tell you, and trust breaks.

He set the context bluntly. You're up against the biggest players in the world, the window is months, compute is enormous, and you have no distribution advantage, only a viral product. He argued the short term unlock is in categories like reservations and travel where an agent can check every five seconds across every restaurant or every site, and where intent matters more than first come first served. He said Instinct is already rethinking reservations with partners to match special occasions on both sides, diners and restaurants.

That's a big claim for a product still invite-only. The founder also said the internet will be rewritten in how people use software, but right now Instinct has to prove a phone number can be a platform before the giants ship the same thing into every inbox and calendar.

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Daniel Singer

Written by

Daniel Singer

Editor, StartupHub.ai

Daniel Singer is the editor of StartupHub.ai, a technology expert and thought leader on AI and its applications across sectors, from fintech and healthcare to developer tooling and consumer software. He writes and tests the tools covered here thoroughly and regularly, and built StartupHub.ai to give founders, operators and buyers a clearer read on what they are actually being sold.