Instinct notes: nearly $1B in transaction volume, 40% card linking, 80% retention
Notes from a conversation about Instinct: approaching $1B in transaction volume, 40% of users sharing a credit card after three weeks, 80% retention among those users, and the view that personal assistant compute will be an order of magnitude larger than coding assistants.
Good conversation, notes: - Approaching $1B in transaction volume; 50% is travel - After 3 weeks, 40% have shared a credit card - 80% retention rate for people who have shared a credit card - Focused on achieving higher-order objectives like establishing trust and having the user’s back versus being a “task accomplisher” - Biz model: blanket transaction fee - Trying to figure out pricing power in terms of take rate and value provided to the merchant through distribution. - Bounds are between payment networks on the low end and the App Store on the high end - How adversarial will businesses be to agents? It depends on what percentage of revenue is driven by the user’s attention on the platform versus transaction completion - Hope is that the incremental volume driven by the headless service will be greater than the compression from being intermediated - At the limit, demand is initiated by Instinct - Product philosophy focused on understandability vs. capability - 10% of people invite someone daily - One way to drive cost improvements is to batch workloads that can be done asynchronously - On the other side, proactivity consumes compute that the user didn’t explicitly ask for - On balance, estimates that these two imply an order of magnitude more compute for personal agents than coding agents - Product improvements coming include full-duplex voice and voice recognition to validate identity - Software will collapse and be generated in real time - Seeing some small businesses run Instinct-native, focused on higher-order objectives like maximizing revenue - Broadly, this represents a path for future direction: achieving higher-order objectives - Less than 50% of traffic is iMessage - Capital-intensive business and focused on using the money to ensure that the product can be free for now
This post quotes another post: “Instinct founder discusses how to build a personal AI assistant”