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A man named Noah Shinn built a free assistant worth ten billion dollars by the age of twenty-three. His company has spent zero dollars on marketing. Anyone with an invite can use it.

In August, investors valued Shinn's company at two and a half billion dollars. Thirty-three days later, Sequoia and Benchmark were among the backers of a new round at four times that, for a product that is free.

Shinn's company is called Instinct.

You text Instinct the way you'd text a friend and it texts you back. Say you promised someone a reply last week and forgot. Instinct is built to remember that thread and text you about it first.

Texting first is the new idea.

In this video I'll show you three things: what Instinct does that ChatGPT doesn't, what testers found when they handed it their email and the one kind of customer a small team could sell a version of it to now.

ChatGPT waits for you.

You have to remember what you need, open the app and type the request before it does anything.

Instinct starts the conversation itself. Its homepage says it "follows up on threads you've dropped" and is "proactively calling or texting you." To notice for you, it reads your email, your messages, your calendar, your screen, your audio and your location.

In September, Shinn's company gave each assistant an email address, so it can sign up for services and deal with businesses on your behalf.

An executive assistant does that job for a boss: watches the inbox and calendar and acts before being asked. In the United States, that person costs a median of about seventy-six thousand dollars a year. Instinct gives a version of that assistant to anyone with an invite.

Instinct doesn't publish its texts. A smaller texting assistant posts one on its homepage, sent before anyone asked: "Morning. Your ten A M moved to eleven. I caught the email and drafted a reply."

That assistant saw the meeting move, drafted the reply and told its user once.

Shinn worked at Sierra before he started Instinct in San Francisco.

The next day, OpenAI announced Dots at its developer day: agents that keep working while you're away. Meta launched its agent, Muse, three weeks before that. Muse passed seven hundred and thirty thousand downloads in five days.

Would you hand an assistant your email, your messages and your location? In August, testers handed all three to Instinct, TechCrunch reported.

The testers revoked Instinct's access to their email. Instinct kept summarizing their email anyway, they said. It also sent email without their permission. Its terms of service claim a "perpetual and irrevocable" license to what users give it.

Fortune puts purchases made through Instinct at about a billion dollars a year.

Instinct itself reports no revenue.

So the valuation rests on a product that charges its users nothing. In the Trends dot V C report, we predict that free agents you text will start charging their users within eighteen months.

A pre-seed investor named Martin Tobias posted that assistants like Instinct "are building too close to the sun and will get replaced by tools from the models very soon."

Other buyers pay for this kind of help today. Founders, executives and real-estate agents pay for assistants, schedulers and software that texts their leads.

Picture a real-estate agent at seven in the morning, scrolling the texts her software sent to new leads. Structurely charges teams about five hundred dollars a month for an AI that texts leads. A second company in that market reports more than twenty-five million conversations with leads.

Her income comes from people she sold to years ago. A couple she sold a house to reaches their home anniversary this week. Another client's closing date is next week.

Those reminders live in her head, while her software texts new leads.

Brokerages see the demand. Compass is pushing an in-house AI assistant on its eighty-three thousand agents, Fortune reported in September. Independent agents outside Compass have nothing comparable.

OpenAI tried a morning brief called Pulse and retired it after about nine months, with the lesson that proactive help has to be "action-oriented." A list of names is one more thing for her to read. A drafted message is something she can send.

A small team could start with twenty agents in one city. Connect their client records and calendars. At seven each morning, text each agent three past clients to call, with a draft message for each.

She reads the first name, edits one line and sends it.

Reach agents at a brokerage's weekly sales meeting, where one manager can put it in front of forty agents at once. The pitch fits in one line: each morning, a text telling you which three past clients to call and what to say.

Shinn's investors are betting that people want an assistant that texts first. The assistants earning money today pick one buyer and send the text that buyer pays for.

Shinn's free assistant reached its valuation with zero dollars spent on marketing. Visit trends dot V C and join more than fifty thousand founders to get the next opportunity.