Why we made you set an intention first

The moment before matters more than the algorithm

Most media apps don't ask you why you're opening them. They assume you know. You tap the icon, the feed loads, and the rest is friction - scroll, tap, watch, repeat. The app itself doesn't care about your purpose. It cares about your time. Algorithms get very good at finding what keeps you there, but they're indifferent to whether that's what you wanted to do.

When we started building Intentr, we kept asking ourselves: what if the app did care? What if, before any content loads, you had to decide what you were actually doing? Not in a preachy way. Just a simple question: what's your intention for this session?

It sounds small. It is. But it's the difference between scrolling and choosing. The moment you write down 'I want to watch a tutorial on film colour grading' instead of opening to a feed, something shifts. Your attention becomes yours again.

We didn't invent intention - we just made it unavoidable

The research on this isn't new. Psychologists have known for years that setting an intention before a task improves follow-through. But intention is weak when it's optional. Nobody sets an intention by accident. They do it when the thing forcing them to do it is slightly annoying to skip.

In the first two weeks of testing, some users hated it. 'Why can't I just open the app?' one wrote. Another said setting an intention felt like homework. But then something changed. The same users came back and said they were spending less time in the app - and enjoying it more. One creator on our platform told us she could tell the difference in her viewer comments. People were engaged, asking specific questions, not just passively watching.

That's when I understood: the intention isn't really for us. It's for you. It's the moment you take your media consumption from something that happens to you into something you choose to do.

The bounded session is the other half

Setting an intention means nothing if the app then ignores it. So we paired it with the bounded session, which ties to your attention ledger. You set your intention, the session starts, and you watch the time pass. Not in a punishing way - it's just visible. You can see what you're spending.

This is where it gets interesting. A few months in, we noticed users were setting longer sessions than we expected. Not infinite ones, but deliberate. Someone might set a 90-minute session to watch a documentary series. Someone else sets 15 minutes to check on one creator's latest upload. The point isn't that shorter is better. The point is that you decided.

The attention ledger then shows you, over seven days or the full history if you're on Plus, exactly what you spent your time on. No judgment. Just data. Creators too - they get to see that their audience is engaged and intentional, not just a play-count number.

Why creators actually benefit from this

When we told creators they'd get 85% revenue share, most of them understood the math. But what some of them didn't expect was that intentional viewers are the viewers they actually want. One creator told us her comments went from 'lol nice' to people genuinely asking about the subject she was teaching. Fewer viewers, better conversations. That's the trade-off.

And because there's no algorithm surfacing content you didn't ask for, creators aren't competing on engagement metrics anymore. They're competing on being worth someone's intention. Some creators love that. Others find it harder. But the ones who stay are the ones creating for real people who chose to be there, not for an engagement score.

What we learned from the boring version

Early on, we considered making intentions optional. Maybe a toggle in settings. Users could turn it on or off depending on their mood. I'm grateful we didn't. Optional friction doesn't work. People just turn it off. The intention only works because it's always there, a small moment of choice before you consume anything.

It's also why we didn't make the intention itself complicated. No multi-choice dropdowns, no suggested intentions, no categories. Just a text field and a thought. 'Watch one video on woodworking.' 'Browse design inspiration for 20 minutes.' 'Catch up on the latest from three channels I follow.' Whatever you're actually doing. Write it down. Then watch it.