Why I Built Intentr: A Founder's Case for Intentional Watching

The Problem Lives in Your Phone

A few years back, I found myself scrolling through platforms for forty-five minutes before realising I'd forgotten why I opened the app. No agenda. No purpose. Just the ambient drift of a feed optimised to keep me looking. I'm not ashamed of that - it's designed to happen. The platforms employ hundreds of people whose job is to make sure you stay longer. But I started to notice something else: creators were losing. A YouTube musician told me she made less per 10,000 views than she did from selling one CD. Podcasters watched as algorithms buried their best work. The creators worth listening to got lost alongside everything else.

That frustration became the seed for Intentr. Not as a morality project, but as a practical one. If you're going to spend thirty minutes with a creator, shouldn't they be paid fairly for it? And shouldn't you actually know why you showed up?

Starting with a Simple Question

When we sat down to design Intentr, we asked ourselves one thing: what if the first step wasn't the feed, but the intention? What if you had to answer a single question before you could consume anything: 'Why am I here right now?'

That felt radical because it is. Most apps hide that friction. They want you scrolling without thinking. But friction isn't always bad. We built a session model. You set your intention (learn something new, be entertained, find a recipe), start a timer, and browse from creators you've already chosen to follow. No algorithm surface-level recommendations nobody asked for. No ads interrupting the flow. Just you, your channels, and a clear end point.

The attention ledger was the piece that surprised us most in early testing. It's not complicated: it tracks where you spent time across your sessions. One user told us, 'I didn't realise I was watching 20 minutes of cooking content and 5 minutes of actual learning. Now I see it.' That visibility changed how they approached media. They weren't building guilt. They were building awareness.

Creator Revenue as the Real Feature

Here's a number that stuck with me: 85%. That's the revenue share we give to creators. The moment you subscribe to Intentr (Plus or Pro Creator tier), 85% of your subscription flows to the creators whose channels you follow. That's not a rounding error. That's a meaningful income supplement for people who've spent years building their craft on platforms that treat them as margin.

A lot of founders talk about fair pay for creators. Most of them don't actually build it into the business model. It's easier to run ads. More profitable to stay agnostic about who benefits. We built the opposite. Your subscription literally pays creators. If you follow five channels and watch them equally, each gets roughly equal revenue from your £ spent. That's not complicated. It's not opaque. It works.

The Pro Creator tier exists for people who want to understand who's watching and how. Analytics dashboard. Revenue dashboard. The kind of clarity that platforms usually keep locked away from smaller creators. We built it because creators asked for it.

The Limits are the Point

Free users get 3 sessions per day, 5 channels, and a 7-day ledger. That's intentional scarcity. Not because we're trying to convert you, but because boundaries work. Three sessions forces you to think about what you actually need. Five channels means you're curating, not drowning. A 7-day window shows you recent patterns without demanding permanent commitment.

When someone says, 'Can I unlimited sessions in free?' the answer is no, and here's why: if the app removes friction entirely, you're back where you started. Scrolling without intention. The price point in Plus tier exists for people who want to go deeper, connect podcasts, YouTube, RSS feeds into their channels, and see their full history. That's not gatekeeping. That's scaling the service beyond what we can reasonably offer for free.

What We Didn't Build

It might be worth saying what Intentr is not. It's not a social network. There's no follow-back system, no comments, no way to broadcast your media habits. Some people hoped for that. The answer was no. Social graphs are powerful, but they also create the exact dynamics we were trying to escape: performance, comparison, algorithmic ranking of people.

It's also not ad-supported. That was a design choice that mattered. The moment advertising enters, the incentive structure flips. You're not the customer anymore; you're the inventory. Advertisers become the customer. We wanted the opposite: you pay, creators benefit, the business survives on that exchange. No hidden layer of optimisation pulling the levers.

And it's not a recommendation engine pretending to be your friend. Intentr won't surface a channel you didn't ask for. No algorithm is going to say, 'We think you'd like this.' You choose your channels. You decide what you browse in each session. That puts control back where it belongs.

The Real Question

Eighteen months in, I'm struck by something we didn't expect: people using Intentr talk about how it's changed their relationship with time. Not in the performative wellness way. In the practical way. They know what they watched. They know why they opened the app. They're supporting creators they actually care about. And yes, sometimes they decide three sessions a day is enough.

The app works because it asks you to work a bit. It doesn't pretend that's effortless. But if you're tired of platforms that optimise your attention away from your own agency, Intentr is built for you.