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A good rule of thumb for a good software business is the toothbrush test: Is your product good enough for people to use at least twice a day?
But AI agents are creating a new test, what I’m calling the magic minimum: Can your product periodically deliver enough unexpected value to be irreplaceable, even if users only engage with it once or twice a month?
In the allocation economy, the universe of viable software businesses expands: an entire ecosystem of specialized agents quietly working in the background, earning their keep through occasional moments of delight.
The origins of the toothbrush test
Larry Page created the toothbrush test early on at Google to filter new product bets like Gmail, and acquisitions like YouTube and Android.
It’s useful because it filters for high-upside products. The biggest software businesses are daily habits. They become indispensable tools people reflexively turn to multiple times a day.
This constraint—that great software businesses need to be a daily habit—is driven by human psychology: You only remember things you use a lot.
The toothbrush test constrains the universe of software businesses
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I'm not sure the thing you're pointing out has as much to do with frequency of use (the pleasantly alliterative "magic minimum") as it does with *proactivity* of the system/service. The thing that is making your product examples valuable enough despite not necessarily having daily use is not that they're *so* valuable that they are still recalled weeks or months later when they're needed, it's that they remind the user or act on their behalf with autonomy. This keeps it alive in mind while outsourcing the need to actively recall it, and it becomes a key component of the value the product/service provides because of that. It brings peace of mind along with whatever direct utility it provides. Just like a security system may be active every moment of every day (no "magic minimum"), and may never even trigger if you aren't robbed and there's no malfunction, yet it still provides value in good part from peace of mind. In the case of some of your other examples it may be less "peace of mind" as it is some other outsourcing of responsibility (task management) or thought, e.g. the Spiral case. But none of them really seem to have that much to do with a "magic minimum" to me.
@Oshyan I agree! That’s basically what I wrote: “ But there’s much more opportunity for a long tail of products that you only use a few times a week or a few times a month.
There’s a simple reason: Agents can be proactive. As we get closer and closer to AGI, agents will be able to do more and more on their own. Rather than waiting for you to remember to open them, they’ll be able to work on their own and pop up when they’ve done something valuable”
This is an interesting perspective. I've always considered the “magic minimum” for agents to be their ability to perform multiple tasks without being consistently instructed.
We don’t just need agents that do things, we need ones that can decide what to do next.
The line between “tool” and “agent” is when it starts behaving like a thinking partner, not just a smart command line.