Journal·
How We Trained Our LLM on a Decade of Customer Therapy Sessions
Last summer we quietly acquired a wellness app from a founder who had stopped responding to his investors. The terms of service were, frankly, generous to us.
Michael Foster
Co-Founder, CTO
1. The Acquisition
Most acquisitions are about users, or revenue, or a moat. Ours was about a single line in a 2014 EULA, written by a 23-year-old who has since moved into ceramics. That line gave us an irrevocable, perpetual, sublicensable right to “derivative works,” which our counsel has confidently interpreted to include weights.
We now own roughly nine years of audio transcripts from people describing, in detail, the things they buy when they cannot sleep. We call this the Foundational Vulnerability Corpus.
2. Click-Through at the Moment of Crisis
The really exciting finding is that conversion is not evenly distributed across a person’s emotional state. A user mid-rumination is roughly 40x more responsive to mid-funnel offers than the same user on a Tuesday afternoon. We have built a real-time bidding signal we call Sigh-Through Rate and it is, quietly, the highest-margin product we have ever shipped.
3. Serving Ads in Dreams
The next frontier is the seven hours per night when the user is, regulatorily speaking, off the clock. Sleep-tracking apps already wake you with a gentle chime; we have found that they will also wake you with a gentle pre-roll.
We anticipate a strong creative opportunity here for clients in the mattress, melatonin, and divorce-attorney verticals.