Why We Built the Session Intention First
Last autumn, a user messaged me. She said: 'I opened your app expecting to doom-scroll for twenty minutes and somehow came away having actually watched what I meant to watch.' That sentence stuck with me. It wasn't a feature request. It was relief.
The Problem Nobody Talks About Directly
We don't struggle with choosing what to watch. We struggle with knowing why we're watching it. You pick up your phone intending to spend fifteen minutes learning about gardening, and thirty minutes later you're knee-deep in something entirely different. Your phone knew you were bored. The algorithm knew it could hold your attention. Nobody asked what you actually wanted.
When we built Intentr, the first question wasn't 'how do we curate content' or 'how do we compete with the big platforms'. It was simpler: what if we asked people to decide their intention before anything else happened? Not after they'd scrolled through recommendations. Not after they'd clicked play on the third video in a row. At the very start.
That's the session intention. You state it. The app acknowledges it. Then you begin.
How It Actually Works in Practice
When you open Intentr, before your content feeds load, you set your intention. This is concrete, not vague. Not 'I want to relax'. More like 'I want to find three new recipes for weeknight dinners' or 'I want to understand how renewable energy projects get funded'. You name it. You own it.
The session timer starts. You see only the channels you've chosen to follow. No algorithm surfaces content you didn't opt into. You're reading and watching what you subscribed to, in the order creators posted it, from people you deliberately said yes to. The attention ledger quietly records how you spent your time. Not to shame you. To show you the truth of where your attention went.
Free users get three sessions daily. Plus subscribers get unlimited. Some people use one session before bed. Others use three or four throughout the day, each with a different purpose. A parent told me she uses one session in the morning for news, another for learning, and sets a strict fifteen-minute limit on her evening session before family dinner.
Why Intention Changes What You Actually Consume
Here's what nobody says about algorithms: they work. They're brilliant at keeping you watching. But they're optimised for engagement, not alignment. Your intention in Intentr is the opposite. You're saying 'I want this thing specifically'. The app does nothing to tempt you sideways.
I watched this happen in our early testing. Users were nervous. They thought intentional consumption would feel restrictive. They worried they'd get bored without algorithmic recommendations. Instead, they reported the opposite. Intention clarified what they actually wanted. When you can't be pushed toward something shiny, you notice what you genuinely care about. Some people realised they were following channels they didn't actually value. Others found themselves reading more deeply, because there was no infinite scroll hijacking their attention.
The intention acts as a filter for your own thinking. It's permission to be deliberate. And that deliberation feels good.
The Ledger Is the Honest Part
Once your session ends, the attention ledger records what happened. How long you spent, what channels you visited, whether you finished anything. It's not gamified. It doesn't tell you if you 'succeeded'. It just shows you the data. The ledger history is seven days on the free plan, unlimited on Plus.
This is the part that surprises people most. Not judgment. Just honesty. One subscriber told me the ledger helped her realise she wasn't actually spending time on what she claimed to care about. She said she loved design, but checked a design channel once every two weeks while spending forty minutes daily on news that made her anxious. The ledger didn't judge her. It just showed her the gap between intention and action.
Some people hate this. They don't want to see the numbers. That's okay. The ledger is there for people who want the mirror.
Why Creators Matter in This Story
None of this works if creators feel cheated. So when you set your intention and watch, the creators of the content you chose get paid. Not from advertising. From the subscriptions that power Intentr. Eighty-five percent of the revenue share goes directly to creators. No algorithm decides their visibility. You decide it by choosing to follow them.
This changes the incentive structure entirely. Creators don't optimise for rage or endless serialisation. They optimise for the people who actually want to see their work. A food writer told me she stopped writing clickbait headlines because her subscribers weren't algorithm-gaming. They were people who opened her channel because they trusted her voice.
The intention system, then, isn't just about you being deliberate. It's about creators getting paid by people who meant to be there. That alignment is rare.
What We Learned From Launch Week
When we launched, I expected early adopters to love the concept but struggle with the ritual. I thought people would find setting an intention every session tedious. We were wrong. Most used it exactly as designed. A handful asked for a 'quick browse' mode with no intention. We didn't build it. If you don't know why you're consuming something, that's the exact problem we're trying to solve.
What surprised us more: people started talking about their intentions out loud. One user brought Intentr to their family dinner and they each set intentions together before scrolling. Another said it helped her partner understand why she was on her phone during family time. She wasn't mindlessly scrolling. She was learning something specific for work.
The intention became a conversation starter, not just a feature.
If you've ever realised you've spent an hour consuming content you didn't actually want to see, the intention isn't a limitation. It's permission to stop doing that. Does that sound like something you'd use?