Day 25: I'm working on the wrong solution
When I first started showing people Intention back in October, the most frequent question I got was: “Can you make this work on my phone?”
It’s been the same with Hide Feed. When I have someone try it, I frequently get asked whether they can get this on their phone.
So why am I building Chrome extensions instead of mobile apps? Targeting the browser would’ve made sense maybe 10 years ago, but today, people have an issue with mindless browsing much more on their phones than they do on their laptops.
The reason why I started by building Chrome extensions was because I built these tools for myself. Over the past year, I’ve transitioned almost all of my mobile usage over to my desktop because it became clear that mobile devices make you especially susceptible to being distracted and wasting time. Today, I pretty much only use my phone for three use cases:
- Time-sensitive communication (e.g. coordinating meeting up)
- Taking notes on the go
- Navigation
Things I don’t do on my phone:
- Use social media
- Respond to messages that can wait (the vast majority of messages)
- Read articles, watch videos, consume content
I’ve been really happy with this practice and I plan to continue minimizing my mobile usage. I’ve really enjoyed being able to build and use tools like Intention and Hide Feed to tailor my experiences on my laptop.
But when it comes to having a large impact, the fact remains that most people don’t operate this way. Most people are constantly using their phones, and tools like Intention and Hide Feed would have a much bigger impact if it helped them make better decisions when they’re lying in bed scrolling through Instagram instead of when they’re sitting on their laptop at a cafe.
I’m working on the right problem, but the wrong solution.
One of the reasons why I’ve been reluctant to dive into building a mobile solution is that it comes with significant limitations. Due to the security model on phones, it’s impossible to hide the feed or limit usage inside native apps like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. The only place it might possibly work is on mobile browsers, but even then, I’m not sure how much control mobile extensions have because I haven’t looked into it.
Basically, something like Hide Feed or Intention would only work for people who are willing to uninstall native apps and use mobile sites for their browsing. That limits the potential impact pretty significantly, but I also know that many people already do this to make it slightly harder for themselves to waste time on social media.
The nice thing about all this is that it makes yesterday’s hand wringing basically moot: Rather than perfecting desktop extensions, I should prioritize working on a mobile solution. There’s significant sunk cost here as I’ve already spent a full month working on Intention, but I know that the right thing to do is to let it go and shift my efforts. I’m hoping that I’m able to reuse a lot of my work when building a mobile solution, but we’ll see.
I’m also flirting with the idea of giving myself a week after launching Hide Feed to basically ship Intention from the point where it is now because it has all the core functionality and just needs some tweaks for better usability. It’s not that desktop usage isn’t important — tons of professionals use their laptops as their primary device — but for helping people spend their time better, targeting mobile devices would have a much bigger impact.
If only I could clone myself a few times and work on all these things in parallel!