This is exactly why most consumer tech feel like a chore to use after a month. Founders are so obsessed with growth hacks that they completely forget how to build something people actually like having in their lives.
Social media is not the largest addressable market on the internet.
Most founders optimize entirely for user experience metrics while completely ignoring how their product affects the underlying psychology of the consumer.
Spotify’s Co-President, Gustav Söderström, explains how founder Daniel Ek bypassed this trap by building around a rare distribution framework.
Instead of fighting a losing battle for volatile attention loops, they anchored their entire ecosystem to an asset class that functions as an Unequivocal Human Good.
The structural advantages of this strategy are distinct:
• Absolute Scale: Not every human participates in social networking, but virtually every human consumes music.
• Defensible Affinity: Traditional feeds eventually trigger cognitive fatigue, whereas high-value utility loops build deep, permanent user sentiment.
It was not a product accident. It was a deliberate choice to build a business where scaling the distribution engine does not require degrading the end user.
What is an industry outside of audio that qualifies as an "unequivocal human good" but remains completely under-built by modern tech founders?