A huge thanks to everyone who tried Pinnacle, commented, challenged us, and shared thoughtful feedback last week
We were excited to finish as the #4 Product of the Day. More importantly, the launch gave us a clear signal about what resonated most.
For anyone new here: Pinnacle turns your iPhone into an AI performance coach. It uses built-in phone sensors, conversation, and wearable data via Apple Health to help you improve focus, resilience, energy, and performance with science-backed tools.
You can download the app here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pi...
A few things that stood out:
1. People want insight, not just more data
One of the strongest themes in the comments was that raw metrics alone are not enough. People don t want another dashboard full of numbers with no context.
They want to understand:
How am I doing right now?
What is driving it?
What should I do next?
That is a big part of how we think about Pinnacle. The goal is not to flood you with biometrics. The goal is to turn signals from your body and behavior into something actionable in the moment.
2. Low-friction measurement really matters
A lot of people responded to the fact that Pinnacle works from the iPhone you already have, without requiring extra hardware to get started. That convenience matters more than we expected.
Several comments also pushed on an important challenge: accuracy and calibration. They were right to do so.
If you are using phone-based measurement, the system has to adapt to the individual, establish a baseline, and avoid overreacting to noisy signals. That reinforced one of our core beliefs: relative progress from your own baseline is more useful than generic scores.
3. Personalisation has to reflect real life
One of the most useful questions we got was whether brain-performance baselines should account for hormonal cycles. The answer is yes.
If you want to understand focus, energy, and resilience properly, context matters.
Personalisation cannot stop at a single static baseline. It needs to reflect the realities of each user s life, including sleep disruption, parenting, pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and cycle-related changes over time.
This is an area we want to keep improving.
4. Coaching works best when it is personalised to state, not just prompts
Another theme was the difference between Pinnacle and a standard LLM.
People have already tried using general AI as a coach, and the common experience is that it still puts too much burden on the user to know what to ask.
What we are building is different: Pinnacle combines conversation with biometric and behavioral context, then guides the right intervention at the right moment.
That might mean breathwork, reflection, a micro-break, or a focused coaching prompt depending on what the system sees.
5. Trust, privacy, and product feel are part of the product
Some of the best questions were about privacy, camera use, and whether the experience feels helpful rather than intrusive.
Those are not side questions. They are central.
We want Pinnacle to feel like a calm, intelligent coach, not another noisy app demanding attention. That means being thoughtful about privacy, clear about how sensing works, and careful about when the product should guide versus when it should get out of the way.
What we re doubling down on now
Better baseline calibration and more personalised scoring
Stronger coaching flows based on both conversation and biometric context
Continued work on attention measurement and training
Better support for more diverse stress and recovery patterns across users
Making the product feel lighter, clearer, and more useful from day one
Launch day was great, but the real value has been seeing which parts of the vision people immediately understood, and which parts we need to explain better.
If you have tried it already, I d love to hear: what clicked for you, and what still feels unclear?
Hacking with Swift
This looks great! Does it have a fairly easy ramp up where you can try a small thing for a while and feel its impact before trying more?
Pinnacle
@twostraws Hi Paul, absolutely!
We have gone through many iterations of the product with varying challenge levels for users. At the end what we realized is that we need to meet the user where they're at and that's what the current system is optimized around.
Let us know what you think once you try the onboarding.
Pinnacle
@twostraws Spot on, Paul. That 'ramp up' was actually a big design challenge. We spent a lot of time thinking about 'meaningful friction'—ensuring the first time you use Pinnacle, you get a win in around 60 seconds without being overwhelmed by the AI logic.
Would love to hear your thoughts on how the app feels once you're in; we're obsessing over making it feel as intuitive and lightweight as possible! 🚀
Pinnacle
@twostraws Thanks Paul. The onboarding was a crucial part of getting the UX right, and the chat interface we landed on gave us the power & flexibility to fully explore the space & its opportunities. It was also great fun to build!
Pinnacle
@twostraws This is where we believe the real sweet spot is with Pinnacle. What we’re aiming to achieve is the optimal challenge point for each user at any given moment in their journey. In practice, this means helping users establish meaningful daily practices and progressing at a pace that is manageable and sustainable as they work towards their goals. The system continuously calibrates based on user inputs and engagement with practices, allowing it to deliver the right level of challenge and support over time.
Turning a phone into a brain performance coach is a cool idea.
Are the exercises based on neuroscience research or more behavioral training?
Would love to know how the progress tracking works.
Pinnacle
@aroido Great question! It’s a mix of both:
We use science-backed exercises (breathwork, microbreaks) to regulate your nervous system.
The AI creates targeted action plans and helps build routines to apply your learnings in your day to day life
For tracking, we have a proprietary performance score, which is tracked alongside your wearable data (sleep, HRV, etc.) for a holistic view. We are also launching a feature soon to track your attention just using your iPhone - imagine meditating and knowing how well you did during the session!
Would love to hear your feedback once you've had a chance to dive in.
@rishab_mehra Thanks for the detailed explanation!
The combination of physiological signals like HRV with behavioral routines sounds powerful.
Curious — how personalized does the performance score become over time? Does the system adapt as it learns more about the user’s patterns?
@joel_jackson1 Congrats on the launch! The angle of using sensors already on your iPhone (no wearable required) is a winner for me. Curious: how are you handling the calibration challenge? iPhone camera-based HRV readings can vary a lot based on placement, lighting, and stillness. What does your accuracy benchmark look like ?
Pinnacle
@jerrybyday I agree, computer vision inherently has these challenge. We have a calibration pipelines built for each computer vision system to try to minimize the friction for users.
For HRV specifically, finger placement on camera is crucial and we guide users through this, as we detect the failure points. Lighting is less of a challenge here, since we can use the iPhone flash. In terms of benchmarks, we have been able to achieve over 90% accuracy (when the user is in a stable position) compared to a Polar Band strapped to your chest.
We have a separate computer vision system for attention tracking launching in a few weeks. The calibration question is much more complicated for that system, and we have a patent pending for it! Let's discuss this in depth when we unveil this feature.
Hope you enjoy the system.
I’ve been using EEG-based feedback apps for years, and the friction of carrying a headset kills the habit. If Pinnacle can really pull cognitive-state detection from nothing but the IMU and camera I already stick in my face every morning, that’s a 100x convenience win—would love to hear how you validated signal fidelity against a clinical-grade device.
Pinnacle
@lliora
Hi Liora, that was exactly our thesis from the start! The friction of dedicated hardware is the biggest barrier. To address your question on validation, here is how we’re currently bridging that gap:
Our primary overlap with EEG is tracking "attention state" (launching in the coming weeks). We’ve validated our algorithm by benchmarking perceived attention levels against publicly available EEG hardware, with very high correlation. We do want to do full scale medical studies here in the future.
We have other measurements built in as well:
HRV: Captured via the back camera. We can achieve accuracy very close to the best wearable hardware out there (we validated against Polar Band).
Psychological State: We extract this from voice data during your conversations with Pinnacle AI.
Wearable Integration: We sync with your existing Apple Health data.
We combine all these inputs to understand the full cognitive state and help you find optimal paths to optimize your performance. Please do give the system a try!
Interesting concept. Turning a phone into a tool that helps people understand their mental state throughout the day sounds powerful. I like the idea of combining biometrics with simple, actionable insights instead of just raw data. Which iPhone sensors does Pinnacle rely on to interpret emotional state and focus levels?
Pinnacle
Been using Pinnacle for a few months and it's one of the few (if not only) products which has a demonstrable impact on focus 😀
Big fan and hope many more people improve their lives through this launch!
Pinnacle
@eeshita_pande thanks Eeshita - always great to hear when the system brings real impact! Do try this new system - it's a big upgrade from the previous beta!
Pinnacle
@eeshita_pande Thank you Eeshita – we really do aim to make a meaningful difference in people's lives, so this is great to hear.
Pinnacle
@eeshita_pande hi Eeshita hope you're well and thanks for your feedback! Great to hear that the system is helping you with your focus! Do try out the new app to experience the new features, we hope you like it.
Trufflow
Why do only the iPhone users get the good stuff?! 😭
Any thoughts on how Pinnacle can help deal with phone addiction?
Pinnacle
@lienchueh We hear you! While we’re starting on iOS to nail the high-fidelity experience, Android is definitely on the future roadmap.
Regarding phone addiction: It sounds counterintuitive for an app designer to say, but we actually built features to help you put the phone down. We have routines specifically for sleep that focus on reducing blue light exposure and reminders to step away from all screens.
We believe a performance coach should help you master your environment, not just your device. Mastering the 'off-switch' is a core part of modern performance.
Pinnacle
@lienchueh We’d really love to make it cross platform. Right now we’re a small team and our computer vision models run fully on Apple’s Metal framework, so iPhone was the fastest way for us to ship something that actually works well. Expanding beyond iOS is definitely something we want to do, it’ll just take a bit of time, sorry!
Phone addiction is a tricky one - a lot of apps try to solve it tactically with screen-time limits or blocking, which can help but usually just treats the symptom. With Pinnacle we go deeper to find the root case. Through conversation you can set a goal like reducing phone use, reflect on what’s actually driving the habit (boredom, stress, avoidance, etc.), and then work with Pinnacle to address the root cause rather than just the behavior. That being said, do try a tactical solution like One Sec until Pinnacle comes to Android!