Day 65: Hide Feed vs. Intention

I’m at an interesting point with Hide Feed — I’ve launched, but there hasn’t been much traction. I’ve had a hard time spreading it on different channels, and it seems unlikely that the situation will change even if I spend more time marketing it.

It’s difficult to know what lesson to take away from Hide Feed not performing well when I post to places like Hacker News and Reddit. One interpretation is that it’s just not a compelling product for most people and that’s why it hasn’t taken off. Another is that it would do well if it got the initial boost to the front page, but it just hasn’t been lucky.

I used to believe firmly that Hide Feed just needed a lucky break, but I’m starting to think that Hide Feed by itself is not a compelling solution to the problem people want to solve: Spending too much time mindlessly browsing.

The reason for this shift in my thinking is that of the people who have tried both Intention and Hide Feed, everyone has said that they like Intention better. I’ve thought of Hide Feed as the tool to help people use websites without the distracting elements and of Intention as the tool to help people use websites less. They’re related because removing distractions helps people use websites less, but it’s clear that people appreciate Intention’s more direct approach.

Given this feedback, it makes sense to invest my time on Intention rather than continuing with Hide Feed. I’m also considering merging the two so that when you unlock a site on Intention, you can hide the distracting elements, but I’m not going to prioritize that right now.

It’s difficult to know whether continuing with Hide Feed would be wise or foolish because those are narratives constructed after the fact. For example, people who threw money at Bitcoin were considered foolish until Bitcoin took off and they were considered geniuses for making such a great investment. (Now we’re back to throwing money at crypto being considered foolish by most people.)

Given the information I have, it does seem clear that continuing with Hide Feed would be falling into the sunk cost fallacy. But who knows — it was only a little over a month ago that I thought killing Intention in favor of Hide Feed was a good idea, so who knows how I’ll think of this decision a year from now.

Decision: Focus on building Intention