Jitai

Inspiration

I've always struggled less with making plans than with actually following through on them. There are plenty of productivity apps that help you organize your goals, but far fewer that help you take action in the moment. We wanted to build something we'd genuinely use ourselves, so we created Jitai with the idea that if it could help us act on our own intentions, it could help others do the same.

What it does

Jitai learns your intentions from your journal entries and the way you naturally talk with it. Using those patterns, it delivers personalized nudges at the right time and through the right channel, whether that's a phone call, WhatsApp, or SMS. Every intervention is grounded in real behavioral economics research, helping turn intentions into action when it matters most.

How we built it

We started by going deep into behavioral economics research to understand why people often fail to act on their intentions. Based on those insights, we built an agentic core engine that takes a user's raw intentions and interprets them through established behavioral theories, such as present bias and our tendency to misjudge our future selves. It then decides what kind of intervention to deliver, when to deliver it, and through which channel, using evidence-based nudges and timing strategies to maximize the chances of turning intention into action.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was figuring out the right timing for each intervention. A nudge that's delivered too early can be ignored, while one that's too late misses the moment when it could have influenced behavior. Finding the right balance of when to intervene based on a user's intentions and context was one of the hardest parts of building Jitai.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a system that works completely end to end, from learning a user's intentions to delivering personalized interventions through phone calls, WhatsApp, and SMS.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about behavioral economics and how difficult it can be to turn intentions into action. Building Jitai gave us a much deeper understanding of concepts like the intention behavior gap, user receptivity, and the importance of delivering the right intervention at the right moment. We also learned that even small changes in timing or communication can have a significant impact on whether someone follows through on their goals.

What's next for Jitai

We learned that getting real users involved as early as possible is invaluable. Seeing people actually benefit from the product helped us refine our approach and reinforced that the most meaningful progress comes from building something that genuinely adds value to people's lives.

Built With

• claude
• codex
• deepgram
• gcp
• langfuse
• posthog
• resend
• sentry
• supabase
• twilio
• vapi