FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Clear answers about wallet credit, usage, subscriptions, and how Tycoon charges for work.
Can AI really run customer interviews, or is that still a human job?
The right split: AI runs everything around the interview, the founder runs the interview itself. AI recruits from your customer list, sends the outreach with incentive, books the calendar slot, sends prep materials, transcribes via Grain or Fathom, and synthesizes the transcript into themes and quotes. The founder shows up for 30 minutes and asks good questions. This preserves the highest-leverage founder activity — hearing the customer's voice directly — while eliminating the 4-5 hours of coordination and synthesis around it. Pieter Levels and Matthew Gallagher (Medvi) both run this model; neither has ever fully automated the call itself and both credit this as a key reason their products stay on target.
How is this different from hiring a research agency?
Agencies produce a 40-page deck per project, cost $15K-$40K, and take 6-8 weeks. This workflow runs continuously, costs a fraction, and produces 2-page memos you'll actually read. The insight isn't that AI is smarter than agency analysts — it's that continuous cadence beats periodic depth for operational decisions. You'll still hire an agency for a one-off deep-dive (a market sizing for a fundraise, a positioning overhaul before a big launch), but 90% of research needs are 'what's happening this week' questions the continuous workflow handles natively.
What if I don't have a customer list yet for interviews?
Pre-PMF, the workflow shifts: AI Researcher focuses on target-prospect interviews instead of customer ones. Uses Clay or Apollo to source profiles matching your hypothetical ICP, sends outreach offering a $75 gift card for a 30-minute call about their current solution to [problem]. Response rates are typically 3-8% — enough to fill 5-10 interview slots per month. This is how early Medvi, Polsia, and other one-person companies validated their ICP before they had paying customers. The workflow survives zero-to-one; it doesn't require you to already be at scale.
How does the AI avoid bias when synthesizing interviews?
Two mechanisms. First, every theme surfaced in the synthesis carries the raw evidence — verbatim customer quotes with interview IDs — so you can audit whether the synthesis is faithful. Second, the AI Researcher is prompted to name disconfirming evidence, not just the dominant theme. If 8 customers say one thing and 2 say the opposite, the memo names both. This is the opposite of the sycophantic synthesis junior researchers produce when they want to tell the founder what they think they want to hear. Tycoon's prompt calibration over the last year emphasizes this heavily — disagreement signals are deliberately amplified in the memo output.
What if I want to do a deeper research project — a market sizing or positioning study?
Step outside the continuous workflow for that. Ask the AI Researcher to run a one-off deep-dive in chat: 'Size the US market for X, pull 8 primary interviews with Y segment, produce a positioning memo with 3 positioning options ranked.' The AI will scope the project, estimate timeline (typically 2-3 weeks for deep-dives), and run it while the continuous workflow keeps running in the background. This is the mode Polsia used for their positioning refresh at $2M ARR — a 3-week focused study on top of the normal continuous cadence.