Framework
Meet Consumers Where They Are
Do not build a new interface and ask customers to learn it. Identify the medium where your target customers already interact with this type of service — email, text, phone call — and build the product to operate entirely in that medium. The lower the adoption friction, the higher the trust, and the faster the referral loop. No app to download, no portal to navigate, no new UX to learn means less resistance at every stage of acquisition.
How it works
- 1How did you communicate with your last accountant? Email. How did you find them? A friend introduced you — by email. Deduction operates in exactly that medium: email the agent the same way you emailed your accountant.
- 2If consumers need to learn a new interface before getting value, you have added an adoption barrier that most will abandon before experiencing the product.
- 3Meeting consumers where they are is also a trust signal: familiar mediums carry familiar expectations. An email from an AI agent feels more professional than a chatbot window.
- 4Email-based agents support viral mechanics naturally — forwarding, CC-ing, and email intro are all native behaviors that carry the product to new users.
- 5The medium constraint also forces product discipline: if the product must work over email, it cannot rely on complex UI to do the heavy lifting. The intelligence has to be in the interaction, not the interface.
Hear it on the podcast
I Already Know You Hate TaxesListen to the episodeMore from this episode
B2B Easy to Start, Hard to FinishB2B is easy to start — design partners are accessible, first revenue comes quickly, and you can reach $2–3M without massive distribution investment. But finishing is brutally hard: selling to thousands of businesses at scale is one of the most competitive and capital-intensive GTM motions in software. Consumer is the inverse: hard to start (expensive distribution, long time to first 1,000 customers), but the historical outcomes, market size, and competitive dynamics favor consumer at scale.AI Should Be DeflationaryMost AI today is used to make businesses more efficient — cutting labor costs, increasing output per employee, improving margins — without passing any gains to consumers. The underbuilt opportunity is AI that lowers the price of professional services for the people who need them. A $1,200 accountant becomes a $499 AI agent. A $10,000 attorney becomes a $200 AI reviewer. The technology should compress the cost of expertise, not just the headcount required to deliver it.
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