Two companies got valued at $2.5 billion on the same day in late August.
Linear took years to earn it: $100 million in ARR, 40,000 paying customers, 177% net revenue retention. Instinct had launched the week before.
Instinct is a personal AI agent with no app. You text it or call it, like a person. It plugs into your email, your messages, your accounts, and then it goes and does the thing. Books the doctor. Calls Comcast. Cancels the subscriptions. Negotiates with the vendor in Mumbai while you sleep.
It has raised $350 million. Users who buy things through it spend over $1,300 a month on average, per the founder. And it is invite-only while they scale compute, which is why the invites at the bottom of this piece are the scarcest thing I have handed out this year.
I have been running it for 2 weeks. Here’s what I learned, what it actually did, how to set it up so it works from day 1, and the texts that get the most out of it.
Inside this playbook:
▫️ Why it feels different from ChatGPT, in one line from a user who ran 677 messages through it in 5 days
▫️ What it actually did in the wild, a categorized log of real tasks, none of them from a demo
▫️ The skeptic’s case, and why it’s the right question to ask
▫️ The setup order that avoids the mistakes, what to connect on day 1, day 3, and week 2
▫️ 30+ ready-to-send texts, organized by the situations you actually have
▫️ 7 workflows, multi-step chains that take a whole job off your plate
▫️ The standing-instructions library, set once, never think about it again
▫️ The 2 integrations that unlock money and logins, and how to use them safely
▫️ Your invite, first come, first served
One subscription unlocks every system
Your subscription opens the full AI Corner archive:
▫️ [The AI Tools and Models library](https://www.the-ai-corner.com/t/ai-tools-and-models?r=1krivi), every model, tool, and setup guide
▫️ [The AI Agents library](https://www.the-ai-corner.com/t/ai-agents?r=1krivi), the full agent-building stack, start to finish
▫️ [The Prompting and Context Engineering library](https://www.the-ai-corner.com/t/prompting-and-context-engineering?r=1krivi), the prompts and context systems that actually ship
▫️ [The Claude and Anthropic library](https://www.the-ai-corner.com/t/claude-and-anthropic?r=1krivi), every Claude playbook in one place
▫️ [The Business and Investing library](https://www.the-ai-corner.com/t/business-and-investing?r=1krivi), turning AI leverage into revenue
Plus 3 fresh systems every week. One afternoon of admin handed off pays the subscription back before the month ends.