Town vs Instinct vs GrokBot | Why the AI Assistant Market Is Not a Bubble
Harry Stebbings talks with Jean-Denis Grèze, former Plaid CTO and founder of Town, an AI assistant that lives in email and calendar. They cover competition from Instinct and GrokBot, moats, model costs and pricing.
The gist
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Grèze argues the winning assistant will have an agent-level network effect, like Town's agent to agent feature, where assistants query coworkers' assistants.
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Most Town tasks use frontier models; Grèze expects costs to halve every 9 to 12 months and calls ElevenLabs the best sounding but expensive.
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He defines success as users who keep paying, says the $15 plan is most subsidized and $99 most profitable, and warns users about costly routines.
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Town makes users connect email and calendar upfront; Grèze says about 30% drop off, but more than 15% of people who try it pay.
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Grèze says AI tooling runs at least $75k per engineer, with Devon in Slack for bugs, Cursor for front end, and Codex and Claude about evenly.
"I love Town. I was saying the team use it here. I'm a DAU and so I was so excited when we agreed to do this."
▶ Play at 1:033 creators recommend it, including Anish Acharya and Olivia Moore.
See all on the Town page"We're users of ElevenLabs. I mean, I just think it's just they sound the best. I'm not paid. I'm not an investor. It is very expensive."
▶ Play at 1:10:208 creators recommend it, including David Senra, Ben Horowitz, and Chris Koerner.
See all on the ElevenLabs page"For a lot of bugs that come in, for a lot of like simpler little things or little visual tweaks, we are kicking off Devin because we just find the team experience in Slack is really really good."
▶ Play at 1:11:1350 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Jason Calacanis, and Guillermo Rauch.
See all on the Slack page"We have a few people who use Cursor for like more visual, the front end. The model's really fast, right? Composer is really fast for front end."
▶ Play at 1:11:1756 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Claire Vo, and JD Ross.
See all on the Cursor page"It's probably 50/50 right now between Codex and Claude. And that's obviously changed a lot. Like I think 5 months ago I would have said it was mostly Claude. But the new Codex is really good."
▶ Play at 1:11:24216 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Chris Koerner, and Peter Yang.
See all on the Claude pageWhat they recommend · 6 picks
"I love Town. I was saying the team use it here. I'm a DAU and so I was so excited when we agreed to do this."
"We're users of ElevenLabs. I mean, I just think it's just they sound the best. I'm not paid. I'm not an investor. It is very expensive."
"I give Instinct hard problems. Like I want Odyssey tickets at the IMAX, continuously monitor it for days by the minute that they're there."
Jean-Denis Grèze
4 picks · guest
"We're users of ElevenLabs. I mean, I just think it's just they sound the best. I'm not paid. I'm not an investor. It is very expensive."
"For a lot of bugs that come in, for a lot of like simpler little things or little visual tweaks, we are kicking off Devin because we just find the team experience in Slack is re..."
"We have a few people who use Cursor for like more visual, the front end. The model's really fast, right? Composer is really fast for front end."
Harry Stebbings
2 picks
"I love Town. I was saying the team use it here. I'm a DAU and so I was so excited when we agreed to do this."
"I give Instinct hard problems. Like I want Odyssey tickets at the IMAX, continuously monitor it for days by the minute that they're there."
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