Bring the Internet to Life
Online businesses must transcend the digital if they want to survive + I spent $35 on a fidget toy
🥇 The Hit List
What ate my attention this week
The Atlantic published an article from social scientist Jonathan Haidt laying out the damning evidence that phones are destroying the wellbeing of children. I quote Haidt’s comments on a new University of Chicago study of the value of social media to college students in the essay below. I’m increasingly just…anti social media as it exists now. I still use it some, but I find it very hard to justify on a societal level. Social media can be designed differently, and I’m really excited about the continued push towards smaller network graphs and fewer dopamine-driven features on alternative platforms.
And over on Broadcast, the relationship of my generation to the internet was explored through the lens of the requisite Adderall addiction. Prescription Adderall abuse was part of my drug use,1 and this collection of essays demonstrates the tension amongst attention issues, productivity, creativity, and competition that drives the need for culturally supported speed. (Though seems like a huge missed opportunity to not have Cat Marnell contribute.)
Since I’m not on ADHD meds and have to manage myself other ways, I spent $35 on this fancy fidget toy and it’s great? Most importantly it’s silent, so you can use it on a Zoom call or in class without disturbing others. I have the Aluminum Junior. My husband reminded me that executive desk toys have long been a thing, and the ONO Roller is aesthetically part of that legacy. (And since we’re in a Corporate Fetish moment it’s on-trend.)
My read-later app, Reader by Readwise, finally listened to me2 and has made it possible to turn off their AI integrations. Their initial AI tool, a kind of copilot, was easy to ignore. But in December they replaced article previews with AI summaries that drove me out of my mind. “The text says” and “The article provides” and “The article delves into” and on and on. It got to the point where I didn’t want to read anything I had saved because my brain started to melt when I saw the summaries. Anyway, you can turn it off now, which is great because as I wrote about at length, Readwise is a key part of my research workflow.
Did you read anything good this week? Buy anything cool? Eat something awesome? Share in the comments! Curate your own recommendation algorithm!
Bring the Internet to Life
Online businesses must transcend the digital if they want to survive.
Awareness of the harms of the social internet and associated technologies, and how corporate greed and lackluster policy have made it so many of the harms outweigh the powerful good, is continuing to increase. And governments are, slowly, starting to catch up. The U.S. has sued Apple for antitrust, the E.U. continues to probe big tech and issue large fines, and India’s 2020 ban of TikTok is inspiring the revised attempts to limit its reach elsewhere. Regardless of how you feel about these interventions, they are growing, and will continue to.
Consumer sentiment about the internet is decaying as well. In The Atlantic, social scientist Jonathan Haidt writes:
A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.
Even the kids don’t want to participate in online life as it currently exists. So what's an online business to do?
The desire for the convenience of the internet is unlikely to go away. Even as more and more people choose to slow their access to that convenience, few will give it up entirely. I have zero desire to lose easy access to the knowledge that the internet stores, even as I make changes to stem the unconscious flow of it into my mind and home.
Convenience is a major selling point for online businesses: you can learn, buy, build, and connect from anywhere. That part should stay. But the experience has to come to life somehow, to escape the code and join the world of the flesh.
We already know how to do this. Prior to the pandemic, there were many successful online businesses that did not rely solely on digital connection. The pandemic gold rush leveraged the mass stay-at-home behavior change to move even more businesses entirely online. But the savviest have continued to push towards hybrid models that bring offline and online together, and now online businesses need a human-first approach in order to survive.
There are three strategies that an online business should consider implementing in order to stand out and meet customers at this pivotal moment where they so strongly desire a change in their digital lives.
In-Person Events
It’s time.3 The massive margins of remote events have eroded the desire to run in-person ones. I get it. Why spend all that money when you can just do it on Zoom? But we know that remote connection is not the same. Being able to see someone’s face, body language, hear their voice, smell ‘em, all of these inputs combine to create a more potent connection.
Hampton, the buzzy online mastermind program, pairs digital cohorts with in-person retreats. The target customer for Hampton is a fairly successful founder: members must have a verified minimum of $1 million per year in revenue, raised at least $3 million, or sold a startup for at least $5 million, and the yearly mastermind fee is $8500. They can afford to travel to events. Hampton knows that digital networking cannot replace the power of in-person connection, especially for busy founders who are used to being asked for favors and attention, so these events are a core part of the offer.
It’s not just community-driven businesses that are focusing on physical reality. ConvertKit, the email marketing SaaS for creators, has run a live conference called Craft + Commerce since 2017. When many software companies seemed to be cutting budgets for in-person events after the pandemic’s heights, they have continued to prioritize the conference. Salesforce’s Dreamforce event is also a huge anchor for the SaaS community, bringing together over 40,000 people in-person and another 200,000 registered to attend online in 2023. When an industry stalwart and a growing startup have prioritized the same strategy, pay attention.
The Human Touch
Caveday is all-in on the human component, but remains exclusively online. Caveday is a membership that runs live work sprints via videoconferencing software to help members get more stuff done. It’s such a simple model, but is something that online businesses have been largely unwilling to do because its growth is tied to humans. Each live sprint is facilitated by an actual factual Caveday-trained person, and members have to actually show up in order to benefit. This is in sharp contrast to many productivity hacks and apps which lever machine learning and gamification to attempt to mimic the experience of human support in a (futile) effort to remove the user from any responsibility for their ability to do their work. By leaning into the very areas that technologists are trying to automate, Caveday stands out in a very crowded productivity market.
Physical Products
People love stuff. Getting real mail in this day and age is a little treat. Why isn’t your company sending them things? When I first purchased ConvertKit in 2017, they offered a cute bribe: if you completed all of the onboarding tasks, they would send you a t-shirt. I still have mine and wear it to the gym every week. At my startup, we ran community giveaways where we sent winners planners and other goodies. We shipped the products with a personal note celebrating the winners and their role in the community. These small actions create delight in the midst of information overload, helping customers to anchor their digital lives in something tangible.
Caveday has also launched branded merch like a sold-out sprint notepag and “Inside/Outside The Cave” indicator coins that are tied directly to the community behaviors that their events promote. The products help to create the feeling of being on the inside of something, even when not actively engaging with the digital community. By bringing the online offline in something as simple as a branded notebook, Caveday extends their community’s reach and boosts customer affinity.
There is something so critical here that I've written about time and again: this level of connection and care does not scale infinitely. It cannot. It can scale quite a lot, and I've built powerful workflows and automations for myself and clients that facilitate connection at scale. But this shift, which is necessary for survival, will have natural limits, and will require more actual humans to do work at your company.
Where have you been trying to get rid of the human touch in your business? That’s probably your greatest opportunity. Successful companies are not just based on solving a customer’s problem; the customer also needs to feel appreciated and understood. A bot can’t do that. Look for the place that you think you should be getting rid of the human touch: that’s likely the best place to add it back.
The day of everything being an infinitely scalable tech company (coughWeWorkcough) should be over. It’s just not true. A tech-facilitated company, yes. Most are. Online and tech-forward businesses have to recognize that in a market that is questioning the very existence of the social internet, their differentiation will be in the unscalable.
How are you bringing humanity to your online business? Let us know in the comments.
for the new ones here, I’ve been sober from drugs for 8.5 years yay! alcohol 6.5 yay! change is possible.
and it was me: one of the co-founders told me I’m the first person to complain about it so you’re all welcome
And you can host a Covid-conscious event! Tests, masks, air filtration…We have the technology!
The way I scrolled through this email to find the new fidget toy...!🤣