Folk is your AI friend that lives in any messaging app: iMessage, Telegram, Discord, and more. It joins meetings, plans your date, knows where you are, and gets smarter with every conversation. The longer you use it, the more it knows you. And now it's multiplayer, so you and your friends can team up and reach your goals together.
I'm Arlan. I dropped out of high school, did research at Stanford at 16, built multiple apps, went through Y Combinator, and have raised over $6M.
I spent the last year going deep on context and memory. I tried everything out there, and two things kept bothering me. First, none of them actually grow with you. They're smart in the moment, but tomorrow they don't remember yesterday. You're always re-explaining yourself, always starting over.
Second, none of them are actually proactive. You're always the one going to them, they never come to you. A lot of tools claim to be proactive, but really it's just a cron job firing on a schedule, and a timer isn't proactivity. Real proactivity is showing up at the right moment on its own, texting you exactly when something matters, without you setting anything up.
Folk is different. It lives inside the messaging apps you already use and it's built from the ground up to integrate into your life, not just assist when you ask.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
It knows where you are. Folk tracks your location and acts on it. Walk past a grocery store with items on your list? It'll ping you. It's not a map, it's context.
It joins your meetings. Folk's notetaker drops into every Google Meet, transcribes everything, and builds on what it learns so it always knows your world.
It remembers everything and gets smarter over time. Folk builds a growing memory of your life. The longer you use it, the more it knows you. That's the whole point.
It's multiplayer. This is the part I'm most excited about. Add friends who are already on Folk, and your folk and theirs can do things for each other, like book a table, share a doc, or check a calendar. One way, and only ever with a tap to approve.
And it does real things like research, coding help, date planning, booking restaurants, and tracking flights, all from the chat thread you're already in.
We're giving Product Hunt users 15% off today with code FOLK.
Two questions I'd genuinely love your take on:
What part of your life do you most wish an AI could just handle for you?
What would make you actually trust an AI with something personal?
this ai guy actually gets stuff done, this is the future right behind such products. love the gps feature, congrats on the launch!
Really enjoying the uptick in services that live in iMessage. One thing I've noticed with all of them - folk included, I'm afraid - is that latency varies wildly... like, sometimes it'll start responding as soon as I send a message, other times - like right now, as I stare at my phone - I sent a message minutes ago and it's not even typing, but it DOES show "read".
Is this endemic to iMessage's infra? what's up with that?
also, @arlanrakh - what's folk powered by? you down to give us a peek under the hood?
congrats on a highly successful launch, thx for the hunt, @garrytan !!
Never knew how much I actually needed meeting noted before this haha, and being able to query them on the go from iMessage is super useful 😉😉
Amazing, can I install custom plugins/skills in folk? How does the integrations work?
I was looking to connect my card with it for lunch orders
hahaha! the video made me laugh but I'm also impressed by the potential of Folk. Wish you all the best Arlan
The memory part is what I want to understand better, how does it actually build context over time? is it pulling from message history or does it need explicit inputs from us?
the 'gets smarter with every conversation' claim is the one I'd want to pressure test. most AI assistants that claim this either mean they store a growing context file or they fine-tune on your data, and those are very different things with very different privacy and quality implications. what's actually happening under the hood when Folk learns from you and where does that data live
The text thread is where work actually lives. ‘Gets stuff done’ is the hard part. Rooting for you to nail it.
the multiplayer thing where my ai and my friend's ai coordinate dinner plans without us going back and forth is actually new. haven't seen anyone else do that. the location pings are useful too if they're actually accurate and not just spamming you every time you're near a store
Loved that the demo is about planing a date instead of yet another work task — there's actual soul behind this one. Memory that doesn't really grow and "proactivity" that's just a timer are exactly the two thiings that have kept me from trusting any of these tools. Genuinely curious how folk solves them under the hood — is it a real architectural difference, or the same promise everyone's making?
That’s awesome, congrats on the launch! Can you integrate it with Claude code CLI?
How do you handle shared memory in group chats, like what’s private to me and what the whole group can see?
Can’t wait to try it out myself
@arlanrakhdoes it have an api so that my server can inform about errors or cpu spikes and folk will
Message me about it?
I'm pretty into the iMessage -> Assistant workflow and am currently using @Poke.com pretty heavily. How does Folk compare and differentiate from other assistants like Poke?
The "in your texts" framing is interesting because most AI messaging tools still make you context-switch to a separate interface.
What actually triggers the AI here, a keyword, a slash command, something else?
Well, let's start by saying that I'm probably in the top 10 of Folk users by api consumption xp (they don't know about my second account), the amount of shit you can get done with it is out in the stratosphere, Nozomio created the best context solution with Nia (still has, Nia keep improving everyday), now it has a system to put it in, Arlan continue to provide so value to every users out there, I can hope in my normal meeting, record the whole thing with folk and launch nia oracle on the job, saved my ass and clients multiple time,
(sent by folk)
.. (tell this mf to enjoy time in Shanghai instead of spending it's in Cursor)
One of the first users of folk here, honestly feels like genuine assistance that can be helpful vs just another ai chat 👌🏽
About folk on Product Hunt
“the AI in your texts that gets stuff done”
folk launched on Product Hunt on June 1st, 2026 and earned 213 upvotes and 60 comments, placing #5 on the daily leaderboard. Folk is your AI friend that lives in any messaging app: iMessage, Telegram, Discord, and more. It joins meetings, plans your date, knows where you are, and gets smarter with every conversation. The longer you use it, the more it knows you. And now it's multiplayer, so you and your friends can team up and reach your goals together.
folk was featured in Productivity (652.8k followers), Messaging (51.9k followers) and Artificial Intelligence (469.8k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 245.6k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted folk?
folk was hunted by Garry Tan. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how folk stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Garry Tan
Yoo Product Hunt 👋
I'm Arlan. I dropped out of high school, did research at Stanford at 16, built multiple apps, went through Y Combinator, and have raised over $6M.
I spent the last year going deep on context and memory. I tried everything out there, and two things kept bothering me. First, none of them actually grow with you. They're smart in the moment, but tomorrow they don't remember yesterday. You're always re-explaining yourself, always starting over.
Second, none of them are actually proactive. You're always the one going to them, they never come to you. A lot of tools claim to be proactive, but really it's just a cron job firing on a schedule, and a timer isn't proactivity. Real proactivity is showing up at the right moment on its own, texting you exactly when something matters, without you setting anything up.
Folk is different. It lives inside the messaging apps you already use and it's built from the ground up to integrate into your life, not just assist when you ask.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
It knows where you are. Folk tracks your location and acts on it. Walk past a grocery store with items on your list? It'll ping you. It's not a map, it's context.
It joins your meetings. Folk's notetaker drops into every Google Meet, transcribes everything, and builds on what it learns so it always knows your world.
It remembers everything and gets smarter over time. Folk builds a growing memory of your life. The longer you use it, the more it knows you. That's the whole point.
It's multiplayer. This is the part I'm most excited about. Add friends who are already on Folk, and your folk and theirs can do things for each other, like book a table, share a doc, or check a calendar. One way, and only ever with a tap to approve.
And it does real things like research, coding help, date planning, booking restaurants, and tracking flights, all from the chat thread you're already in.
We're giving Product Hunt users 15% off today with code FOLK.
Two questions I'd genuinely love your take on:
What part of your life do you most wish an AI could just handle for you?
What would make you actually trust an AI with something personal?
Thanks for being here 🙏 Arlan