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  • Smart Keys, Idea to Profit

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    This is a summary of a 16 months journey. From idea to profitable business.

    The idea was born from a personal need. I wanted a tool that could help me proofread my texts on my phone or computer. My main inspiration was Grammarly. But better. (Delusion is a requirement for starting a business).

    I didn’t want to start another VC-backed startup. I wanted to build a lifestyle business, something my wife and I could run together and make a living from. This is important because some ideas just don’t fit that kind of model.

    I was drafting a method to build things I care about. This is my secret process now, but it wasn’t back then. In summary, it was something like this:

    1. I have a problem, and the solutions aren’t good

    I have always struggled as an ESL learner. My wife has too. Writing an email or a simple text message and feeling confident about it was always a struggle. This was always a top of mind problem.

    We had been using Grammarly to help us with that, but it was infuriating. Always trying to teach me and repeatedly correcting itself. I got really excited about the possibility of making a tool that a company needed millions of dollars and hundreds of engineers to build, but doing it with just me and my wife. We were either geniuses or about to have a very expensive hobby.

    Grammarly and other players were moving a lot of money and traffic and growing. My goal was to get 1% of their market share. I figured that was a humble enough slice of the pie. Spoiler: It was not.

    2. Lets build it

    The first version was a wordpress site that was simply proofreading my texts. It had a prompt that I was always using on ChatGPT.

    That evolved to a point that I was using it everyday. My wife too. We added more “pre prompts” and suddenly it became a huge list of prompts for different purposes.

    The first names were Slap Keyboard and Tapp Store. I am not proud of those. It took some time to feel confident with Smart Keys. I still don’t think it is the best name (it sounds like a car key tool), but we got to a point that we needed to launch. We could change it later. We didn’t.

    The tool evolved to something more than just proofreading. It became a tool to easily convert any text to any language, or even create your own text transformation.

    3. The launch

    We had not tested the market costs before building it, because apparently I like not following my own process. So I was curious to get the first numbers for cost of acquisition. We created many creatives and started seeing people quite excited.

    We gained some traction on a few of our reels.

    Because my budget is quite restricted, I decided to focus on one main channel to distribute and market. Mostly iOS for distribute and Meta for marketing. I tried Apple Search Ads and Google Search Ads. I did not succeed.

    I noticed that the first customers were using the app multiple times a day. That gave me confidence to scale more ads. Even though ROAS was low, I was confident by our own use and those first customers that eventually we would get that money back.

    As a product person, I decided to create a MacOS version of it. The concept is the same: an easy way to proofread or transform your texts. However, I ended up using the Mac version much more than the iOS one.

    One major event that happened about a month after our launch was the introduction of the native proofreading feature on iOS 26 (iOS and MacOS). That made me a bit worried, thinking people might stop downloading our app. However, our use case is so broad and offers many possibilities that we kept going. We even joked that Apple copied us.

    Apple Intelligence Writing Tools VS Smart Keys

    What we tried and failed

    • Reddit as a tool for feedback: There are way too many people asking for feedback and not enough actually giving it. I got some feedback here and there, but honestly, a lot of time is spent for very little value. Plus, a lot of communities don’t let you share your product, which makes sense because people just sharing their stuff without joining the conversation is pretty annoying. Reddit Ads has cheap clicks, but no conversions.
    • Apple Search Ads and Google Ads: Too expensive for us. We couldn’t get a good ROAS.
    • Influencers: Unless they have a huge audience (millions of followers), they are not worth it. Their videos also didn’t perform even as Ads. And if they are big, it will be expensive. I particularly do not like this because it is like a one shot thing. Get a spike of downloads that doesn’t sustain. I want something I can bring users over time.
    • Product Hunt: A good tool to improve SEO. Don’t expect meanigful feedback or get ranked well. Many robots and people selling upvotes.
    • TikTok: Cheap views and clicks, but very low conversion rate.
    • MacOS version: I like this version more than the iOS one, but I couldn’t find a channel to market it.

    12 Months burning cash

    The first six months felt like a slow cooker with our small marketing budget. The profit chart was slightly going down every month. I started to doubt my strategy a bit, should I put in more money to see faster results, or was this not going anywhere? But the LTV numbers started to improve, and retention remained very high.

    Month 4 retention for active subscribers is above 60%

    The good news started after six months, when the ad costs finally became lower than the profits. I didn’t expect it to take that long to see the chart reverse and start earning money again. Naively, I thought we would be profitable in about three months.

    16 Months later

    After 12 months, we recovered everything we invested from the start and finally began making money, not a lot, but enough. Margins are tight. The app is stable and requires little maintenance. The money we earn is being used to fund our other ideas.

    Seeing the profits surpass the costs was an important milestone for us. I confess that I slightly reduced the budget just to see that happen faster during that month.

    But I still don’t really feel pumped about dropping over $25,000, mostly with Meta. It’s wild to think that while my customers’ LTV is about $35, Meta’s average LTV is probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

    So, are we rich?

    No. Did we make Zuck richer? Yes.

    Smart Keys didn’t become the “Grammarly Killer” I naively thought it would be. I didn’t get my 1% market share. Maybe 0.0001% 🤷‍♂️❓

    But what I got was a business that pays the bills, works for us, and allows me to keep building weird stuff. I traded the stress of “growth at all costs” for the anxiety of “I don’t get a support ticket for months. Are users stuck on the first screen?” and honestly, I prefer the latter.

    It’s not a unicorn. It’s a small, profitable, slightly oddly named app that solves our problem, and we use it every single day. That’s exactly what we wanted.

  • My No-BS Building Process

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    Indie dev notes from building outside the VC fantasy

    Most people talk about building like it’s about speed. Ship fast… move fast… break things… Really?

    The longer I’ve been building stuff, the more I see that the real work happens before anything actually ships. That quiet, slow phase where it doesn’t look like much is happening yet.

    I have read many books about creating a startup, product iterations through experiments, finding market fit, and leveraging viral effects. They share a playbook that might work (or pretend to work) in the VC world.

    The thing is, the indie-solo-bootstrap reality plays a different game from the silicon-valley-BS-unicorn fantasy. The good news is that there are many great books and resources available for those dreaming of a lifestyle business.

    The spark to find my process came from one the first chapters in the MAKE book. It’s a good book for someone who wants to start building things and has no idea where to begin.

    As a big fan of the Go Horse methodology, I tend to go straight to the building step. And that’s no good. That was the reason I decided to prioritize more the planning and research steps more in my life. And I wanted to build things that matter. Or at least, things I care about enough to finish. I realized that having a clear path helps when you’re stuck in the “what should I build” loop.

    So here it is: my secret building process.

    Celebrating and crying are important parts of it.

    Let’s start with the first one, which is actually creating a list. From now on, I love lists.

    1. My top problems

    Spend a couple of weeks simply listing the problems in your life. (If you don’t have any problems, try making your life a bit more interesting stepping out of your comfort zone)

    The Secret: Just write them down. Don’t worry about fixing them yet. It’s harder than it sounds because our brains want to jump straight to the solution. Try to resist that. Just let the problems linger and bother you.

    When you’ve got a solid list, rank the stuff. Be real about what actually makes your life miserable and what’s just small annoyances you complain about. Keeping it simple is best. I tried a fancy decision matrix once, but it was way too much work and didn’t help much. Just going by the order of the problems worked best.

    I’m still working through some things from my list from three years ago. But yeah, it’s a list that I occasionally add new items to. As you can see, there are various problems, such as the desire to write more or eliminate hair in unwanted places. 👙

    I spend around 2 weeks and come up with 20 items.
    I’ve used Notion, so I could later document the next steps and status.

    2. Solve them (without building anything)

    Start by addressing the first item and look for possible solutions that already exist. Test them. You may actually find a product that solves your problem perfectly. If so, congratulations, you just saved yourself months of work. Job done. Move to the next one.

    The secret: I was pretty amazed that just by switching up my habits and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I fixed a bunch of problems. I started a 5-minute-a-day workout (which felt like a lot since I’m usually pretty inactive), and that kicked off a chain reaction, helping with stuff like back pain and improving my sleep.

    I also began volunteering at local non-profits, which really helped my networking. And the best part? It didn’t cost me a thing and didn’t involve any tech.

    Three years later, most of the items are done, and I feel it’s time to go back to step one again very soon.

    By simply adding a status to the list, I was able to track them easily.

    3. Market research

    Alright, now the real game starts. If you didn’t find a solid fix for a big problem, your experience testing existing solutions earlier will help you see what’s missing. Here’s where most people go wrong, don’t start building just yet. Check out some marketing numbers first. Use SimilarWeb or SensorTower to gather some data about the players.

    Check-in: I prefer a market with big players, either in revenue or traffic, hitting millions a month. I’m a bit cautious about untapped markets. This probably isn’t the best problem to tackle while bootstrapping. I think I need to be really excited about the project to decide to keep going.

    The secret: By the way, being excited is a huge part of my process because building something is tough. There will be lots of times I’ll want to quit, so that excitement has to push me forward during those moments.

    4. Now it’s your time to shine

    Now that you have a good idea of what you want and what the market looks like, split your time in two. If you are a product person, really force yourself to spend more time on marketing, and the opposite for marketing folks.

    4.1. Test the market

    This next step totally changed the game for me: run ads and use simple forms to figure out acquisition costs. Getting users’ emails also helps you build a list of beta testers to stay in touch with. And yeah, you gotta talk to people dealing with the same problems.

    Marketing Requisites: You have to spend money here, there’s no way around it. Someone who tells you otherwise is trying to trick you into buying their stuff. If you’re not willing to pay to find customers, either this problem isn’t that big a deal to you or you don’t really believe in your idea.

    Tip: Last time I did this, I ran a Meta campaign using their Lead Online Forms. I tested my idea against 3 others to compare CAC and ended up finding another opportunity. Check out the Bird Rise story.

    4.2 Build an MVP

    Whilte your ads are running, you can start building. This should answer technical questions and solve your specific problem. Keep it small and meaningful for now, because in less than six months, it will surely become a little monster with all the features added from user feedback.

    Tech Requisites: Be careful with the scope and tech stack. You don’t want to build something that requires high server costs or maintenance.

    Use your own product. Remember, this came from your list of top problems you wanted to solve in your life. But try not to fall in love with your idea. Fall in love with the process of solving problems. Share your MVP with those first people from your initial Ads. Do the adjustments based on their feedback. You will have bugs. Many bugs. If users are not reporting bugs, you are not hearing them. It is hard to get good feedback. I still struggle here.

    Check-in: While you’re going through this, you might realize your idea isn’t really fixing the problem. Technical issues pop up. CAC might be too high. The problem could be trickier than you expected. This is a good time to pause and think about whether you want to keep going. Quitting now isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually pretty smart. It saves you from wasting months on something that a solo person or small team can’t crack. Just go take a shower and have a good cry.

    5. Launch

    I fixed all the bugs, adjusted the product based on early user feedback, and developed a decent version of the marketing strategy. Now it’s time for a reality check. What I want to figure out now is the real cost to attract paying customers and how much they’ll actually value my product. That way, I can get a clearer idea of whether this product will be sustainable or if I have enough money to keep it going.

    The Secret: My go-to plans are short- and long-term subscriptions with a 3 to 7-day trial and lifetime discounts. This approach allows me to account for some costs related to the trial (CPT) preety fast and generate some revenue from lifetime discounts.

    I like weekly plans as an anchor for other plans and as a way to measure if the product is good enough. In a month or so, I should have a better idea of retention based on renewals.

    There will be many iterations here, from onboarding to pricing. Be patient before making major changes and try to get a good volume of users first.

    How about growth hacks, virality, and organic strategies, Dieguito?

    – Your Favorite VC

    Sorry, but I don’t trust organic growth as the main strategy (yet?). With the flood of AI-generated apps, welcome to the bloody ocean of the app market. Apple and Google wouldn’t surprise me if they start charging per app published instead of by developer account. The only people who don’t like paid acquisition strategies are VCs, they love to hear zero-marketing budget BS.

    6. Measure

    The most important metrics for me are CAC related: CPT (Cost per trial), CPS (Cost per subscription) and ROAS. That is it. Retention, Profits and LTV are critical, but they take a while to measure meaningful data. You will change prices a lot until you find what works.

    Good tools to help you with that are Mixpanel (connected with the Meta API) and RevenueCat.

    Smart Keys Dashboard

    Check-in: From those numbers, do another check-in. Scaling ads while bootstrapping is tricky and can get expensive quickly. Proceed with caution. You can see the blue line rising faster than revenue in the first chart. Six months later, I reevaluated to make the ad spend more sustainable.

    What about Experiments, weren’t you the king of A/B Tests?

    – Your Favorite Scientist

    First off, I’m not the king, maybe more like the Prince 💁‍♀️. I used to get super excited about experiments, especially the chance to discover something novel. I spent tons of hours designing, coding, and running experiments, sometimes with awesome results from tons of data points. But the weirdest part was that when we rolled out the experiment to all users, we didn’t see any change.

    What was probably happening was a lack of statistical power, which is a major issue in science itself. People often talk about statistical significance, but that’s really just an agreement that the result is unlikely to be due to chance, unlikely… unlikelly.

    Another thing to think about is what you actually measure. Experiments should ALWAYS be judged by the final metric, which is REVENUE. Tweaking middle metrics like signup rate or onboarding steps doesn’t always affect revenue. Sometimes a big jump in signup rate doesn’t do anything for revenue (I’ve even seen it go down 💸)

    The Secret: So, when I start a new project, I usually don’t have the cash, team, or tons of data to run experiments. These days, I’m more into getting ideas from behavior construts that big companies have already tested a lot, like social proof, authority, commitment, scarcity, and so on.

    10. Scale (or not)

    Welcome to the real world, you’re now a real player in the market. Scaling means you’ll be up against those big players you checked out months ago. Your campaign performance won’t be the same with your small budget. You’ll probably need more creatives, get more support tickets, and messing up your server or introducing a bug could disrupt thousands of users (While I’m writing this, I’m waiting for Apple to approve a bug fix for a version I messed up, and now users are stuck.).

    I consider it actually a good success if you can deliver a good product but can’t scale during the first months. You solved your own problem and helped other people solve theirs. Scaling takes time and requires good cash flow.

    The Secret: If you’re going solo, find a buddy to do a bi-weekly check-in with. I’ve been doing this with a friend who’s also building stuff. Sharing progress and struggles helps keep you accountable and gives you new insights from another perspective.

    The truth: This part of the process is still a work in progress, and I’m not totally sure I cracked the secret here. Either way, whether you managed to scale or not, it’s probably a good time to take a shower and have another cry.

    That’s it

    This is a live process. It involves some iterations and may take time. It has evolved since I read the nudge from the MAKE book that if your list of problems is small, you should make your life more interesting. I signed up for the 540-mile bike ride from SF to LA, which brought me beautiful problems to solve.

    For Smart Keys, I followed most of the steps above. However, I admit that in other projects, I skip some parts I don’t like much, such as properly testing the market.

    Air Fiesta is a very poor example of a project that failed on many levels. It started by not addressing any of my problems, was technically complex, had a huge scope, and I did inadequate market research. I did it simply because I had free time and was excited about building a game using the Google Maps SDK related to a cause. I even added to my list of problems just to justify its development: “I want to create games again.” 🥸

    But I am trying to be better at it. Bird Rise was actually a pivot inspired by insights during the market test. And Air Fiesta and other tiny games actually brought a main insight about using games as a marketing tool. So maybe I am learning something after all.

  • Reader Mode, RSS, and the Business of Interrupting You

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    I used to be an RSS user, and I loved it. Most mornings started the same way, ginseng tea on the desk, laptop already warm, and Google Reader open before anything else so I could check what was new.

    I could easily read blogs written by friends (people I actually wanted to hear from, not people I happened to know). I could also pick the brain of strangers I admired, bookworms, travelers, designers, developers, nerds scattered around the world, people I would probably enjoy being friends with but never met.

    That simplicity was great for readers and bad for anyone trying to sell attention. RSS stripped pages down to the part that mattered and ignored the rest. No ads or tracking, and none of the urgency theater. That also meant no money, which explains how this story usually ends.

    RSS had already existed for years before that moment, mostly living quietly in the background of blogs and personal sites. It started as a fairly nerdy idea in the early 2000s, a simple XML based way for websites to say “here is what’s new” in a format machines could understand and humans could benefit from. Blogs adopted it quickly. News outlets tolerated it. Big platforms embraced it just enough to look open, then they quietly lost interest once they naively realized how little leverage it actually gave them.

    So, in 2013…

    Google shut down its RSS reader.

    I frustratedly migrated my feeds to other readers and pretended that was a solution. It worked for a while, but around the same time, social media and Google News got very good at hijacking attention. You stopped choosing what to read and started letting something choose for you. Checking in turned into staying indefinitely.

    I could still see what friends were doing on social media. Google was giving me interesting things to read. If I measured how much time I spent consuming information, I would probably describe myself as informed. That metric looked good on paper.

    I ended up forgetting about my RSS feeds. They faded from my radar, and I told myself that it was fine. What did not look as good was how I felt.

    Over time, that tradeoff became impossible to ignore. The less time I spent on my phone or on social media, the better my days felt. I had more energy for new ideas. I was more willing to start projects instead of postponing them.

    I even felt.. smarter? 🤷‍♂️, it’s hard to explain, I felt my brain more in sync. This was not a dramatic realization, just an accumulation of small, repeatable signals. So I started deleting things, one app at a time, watching the home screen get emptier and my mornings feel lighter.

    Social media went first, which was easier than expected. Work related apps followed, which felt irresponsible until it did not. The last thing I could not let go of was Google News. Some of it was convenience, some of it was fear of missing out. Mostly it was that Google News lives inside the browser, which still feels nonnegotiable on a phone. I even tried removing the browser app entirely. That experiment did not survive long.

    The journey to the RSS nostalgia

    There were things I genuinely liked about Google News. It surfaced relevant topics often enough to feel useful. I could remove outlets I did not want to see anymore, which gave me a comforting illusion of control.

    By the way, did you know that you can add this blog to your Google feed? Try it here.

    Still, I would regularly get pulled into scrolling spirals or feel oddly irritated by publishers that hijack the back button just to dump a wall of clickbait in your face. This is directed at you, SF Gate.

    Big tech has always had a weird relationship with aggregators, mostly because feeds threaten things platforms care deeply about: ads and data, plus control. RSS was inspired by an Apple research group initiative, briefly embraced by large platforms, and then slowly abandoned. A feed that gives readers everything and takes nothing back is hard to justify inside an ad driven model.

    And then this morning happened.

    Today as in Christmas Day. I woke up by an app I am building around gentler mornings and started testing iOS accessibility settings, things like font size, contrast, and other details that matter when you are designing for people who do not interact with screens the same way. For the record, I am officially using 110 percent font size on my phone now. Happy 40+ to me.

    Well, somewhere in that wandering, and squinting a little more than I used to, I rediscovered Reader Mode in Safari and learned something I had completely missed.

    You can make Reader the default!

    For most websites, not all, but enough to change how the web feels. It is not an accident that Reader Mode does not work on many news articles opened from Google News, while the same article often works fine when accessed directly. Clean reading experiences being treated as optional instead of default is a business decision, not a technical limitation.

    I turned it on and immediately felt transported back to how reading used to be. Articles looked like they were designed to be read instead of converted (well, sometimes an article converts your soul though).

    Reader mode OFF
    Reader mode ON

    Apple ships Reader Mode, and features like “hide distracting elements”, which quietly enable one of the best reading experiences on the modern web. This is where accessibility gets interesting, and a little uncomfortable for companies. That has always been a slightly contradictory position for a big tech company. Apple is not particularly fond of ads, and it also has history here. The Apple research group I mentioned earlier created important technologies around accessibility before being shut down under Steve Jobs.

    News business model

    I understand the challenge of news outlet business models, which are genuinely complicated. A feature like Reader Mode or LLMs does nothing to help a news-ad-driven strategy, so it is not surprising that companies look elsewhere for revenue. The New York Times Games (!!??) division becoming one of the company’s main revenue drivers says a lot about where sustainable attention is easier to build. Looks like we finally understood why people bought newspapers in the past, for the crosswords.

    What surprised me most was how quickly my body reacted to this change. The tension I had normalized while reading simply disappeared. Especially in the morning, when my tolerance for persuasion is close to zero.

    Reader Mode does not feel like RSS in how it works, but it feels like RSS in how it lands. It works directly from semantic HTML. It keeps the intent and discards the infrastructure. You arrive because you chose to, and you leave because you are done. Nothing in between tries to keep score.

    I do not think RSS failed because people stopped caring about reading. I think it failed because it was bad for business. I am also fairly sure this feature does not make some companies very happy. SF Gate, again, is still able to inject ads into Reader Mode or force a refresh after a short delay, which conveniently breaks the reading flow. These patterns exist to reassert control, reintroduce tracking, and remind you who actually owns the surface you are reading on.

    Reading as a special need

    Universal design is often framed as altruism, sometimes as something utopic. Accessibility features take real effort to build, the return on that effort is hard to quantify, and the revenue upside is rarely obvious. Because those capabilities are usually used by fewer people, advertising stakeholders rarely worry about losing that audience, at least at first. That changes the moment uninterrupted reading starts to feel like a special need.

    I did not plan to feel sentimental about it. I was just testing accessibility capabilities, half awake, thinking about font sizes and contrast ratios. Then I stumbled onto something I thought I had lost a long time ago, a good reading experience, one paragraph after another, without anything pulling at my attention.

    It turns out the hard part was never giving up RSS. It was remembering that choosing how to read is still an option.

  • Smart Devices, Smart Tools, Me Smart?

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    If my phone’s supposed to be so smart, why do I feel dumb and empty when I’m holding it? Especially in public.

    I guess it all started with the miracle BlackBerry promised me back in the day…

    “Imagine checking your email on your phone.“

    That was the big trick pitch: a corporate fantasy carved into a tiny plastic keyboard. Productivity in my pocket and urgency on demand. Companies used to give them to leaders who would show off to their peers how important they were. High-achieving executives becoming gods: omnipresent, omniscient, and online.

    They made a gadget that makes work tag along everywhere we go, kinda like a loyal dog that just won’t quit barking.

    Loyal… and honestly, quite dumb.

    That was the puppy tail-wag of the distraction beast I’d later ride.

    From the movie about BlackBerry.

    Then…
    the real smart phone

    A calendar, a camera, a notepad, a map. Basically a whole bunch of “smart tools” all packed into a glass rectangle. It felt pretty cool, almost like magic. Like having more stuff made me smarter. Like strapping 30 books to my chest and calling myself a scholar. But I get it, if I wanted all those tools with me before, I’d need a huge backpack. Now, it fits right in my pocket.

    Were these tools actually smart though? Or am I just dazzled by shiny stuff?

    Because adding a calendar to a phone doesn’t make me wiser. Adding a camera doesn’t deepen my attention. Email in my pocket just means my responsibilities now commute with me. It was never about intelligence. It was about access and speed. About making everything available all the time, including all the things I wish would leave me alone.

    Then…
    social networks

    A feed of friends. Updates. Photos. The digital town square. Cute, almost harmless… until it wasn’t.

    The town square warped. The edges sharpened. Likes and dopamine hooks were discovered. Social networks metastasized into social media, a business model that survives by removing friction, slowing nothing down, feeding me faster than I can think.

    And from that mutation came the final form: the short-video feed. Infinite, vertical, high-stimulation loops made by the unconscious math god with messed-up metrics to hijack whatever was left of my prefrontal cortex and replace it with pure reflex.

    We accidentally find a drug inside ourselves that’s kicked off by a loop of images, sounds, and interactions, not by external chemicals. Like a nerd who hacked our brain just by showing us a funny cat video, and the expectation that in a swipe you’ll see something so cool… maybe not… probably… let’s try…🤷‍♂️

    I’m too old to be affected

    People love freaking out about kids and “brain rot”.
    The truth is uglier. It fries everyone.

    There are a bunch of laws about stopping kids from using certain apps or smartphones at all. This isn’t new, tech moguls are known for not letting their kids use what they create.

    Well, but dopamine in the brain doesn’t care how old we are. We talk about dopamine like it’s some magical pleasure juice, but it’s more like the brain’s “hey, good job, do that again” notification. And social apps know this.

    Scroll, surprise, scroll, surprise… that little unpredictability is the hook. Not the content, the “maybe”. My brain starts chasing the “maybe” like a dog that heard a treat bag.

    The APA review basically said the same thing in fancier words: overstimulation trains your brain to want fast, easy rewards and ignore anything that takes effort. Reading. Deep focus. Making things that don’t give instant feedback. You start craving the hit more than the meaning.

    No wonder everything feels kinda shallow. I trained myself that way. Or even worse, I let the apps do the training for me. If BlackBerry was like a loyal dog, now I’m the dog, and somehow TikTok trained my brain like a pup waiting for treats.

    When I vent about this with friends, some give me weird looks like they don’t really get why it’s a big deal. They say it’s just a free way to have fun, connect with friends, and socialize. But half the time, I can’t even finish my rant before they’re glued back to their phones. That infuriates me, but I don’t feel mad at them. This kind of behavior was purposely designed to disconnect us, I can’t compete with cat videos and fish falling from sky. So here I am, talking to my future self, hoping he’ll actually listen.

    Which is probably why a little voice decided to show up right now and poke me in the ribs:

    “Ahhh Diego, weren’t you a tech-utopian-bro?”

    – Yesterday Me

    I like the utopian bit. The bro? Not so much. But I do like shiny objects, so maybe I’m just a crow in a hoodie. I loved the idea of a future rescued by clever inventions.

    For years, I read all the stuff that backed up the dream. I followed futurists, TED talks, and those “everything’s getting better” charts. Then, inconveniently, I smelled something rotting and started checking other charts…

    (Don’t worry, I’ll stay shallow here and won’t share the link, they don’t smell good, so we can keep living in our little utopian bubble.).

    Like…

    • The global happiness reports sinking.
    • The mental health metrics twisting in uncomfortable ways.
    • Life expectancy stalling.
    • Loneliness breaking records.

    (See, all good)

    The shiny future started to look like a refurbished present. Same model, worse battery. These issues might not be caused by tech use, but when we see the problems more intense in countries with more access to technology, it makes me think that we should be more critical about the dark side of tech use.

    But wait, there’s good news!

    Some smart folks out there are escaping this trap, like Melanie Perkins, Canva’s CEO, famously keeps her phone clean. No email. No Slack. Closes the laptop and actually disappears for real.

    Must be nice to have a team that keeps the world going while you chill. Be present feels like such a fancy treat when someone else covers the cost. I guess being smart means deleting apps from your phone and paying someone else to handle it for you.

    So, unless you turned into a billionaire CEO, Dieguito, this isn’t really good news for you.

    – Not Billionaire Diego

    What about the rest of us?

    I can’t outsource my worries.
    I don’t have an assistant filtering my chaos.
    I can’t “disconnect for clarity” when my entire life, job, and sense of self are stuffed inside the same device that is quietly hollowing me out.

    And here’s the part I don’t love admitting:
    I’ve tried everything.

    Apps that block apps.
    Reminders disguised as wisdom.
    Daily goals plastered on my home screen.
    The whole monk-mode starter kit.

    I wishful thinking about an ideal self
    that may never exist.

    How about creating something?

    One of my recent goals is to build stuff that solves my own problems. I’ve done this a bunch of times before, and the worst that happens is I just fix my own issue. The best case is helping more people get what they need.

    Leandra and I have been talking about how to cut down on distractions and mindless social media scrolling so we can actually get stuff done. We’ve been thinking about making another one of those social media blocking apps. I think they help a bit, but we never really felt motivated to make just another tool like that (or we don’t have deep-thinking abilities anymore).

    Those apps try all sorts of tricks, all gimmicks to be honest, just to sell some subscriptions. Our gimmick was just about trying to stir up some anger towards tech moguls, :p

    Mockups of our social media blocking app that we’re never gonna build.

    Digital Marie Kondo Method

    Also, I tried the “Does it give me joy?” approach from Marie Kondo’s method to organize your house, but I applied it to my phone to declutter things, and it helped a bit.

    That was the day I removed Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other apps from my phone, even though I needed them for work-related tasks. Now, I just reinstall them when needed and uninstall them immediately after. Or only access from my computer.

    Surprisingly, just asking myself if a certain app was really making me happy was a pretty good way to decide if I should keep it or not.

    Good idea, didn’t last long.
    My current home screen.
    It’s kind of working.
    Tried removing all apps from my home screen and just kept a list of goals, but it didn’t last long. Then I tried having only meaningful apps on one screen, and that’s still going strong.

    Did it work?

    Sometimes… for a day.
    Sometimes… for a week.

    After removing apps
    and leaving my phone in other rooms
    and keeping on airplane mode most of the time.

    Still,
    every single time,
    it takes exactly one thing to break the spell.

    A friend sends a video.
    Or a meme.
    Or a “you have to see this” link.

    And just like that, I’m back inside the machine, scrolling like nothing happened.
    Like a lab rat who memorized the maze but still runs it anyway.

    And once the spell breaks, it’s the same old story.
    No enlightenment. No clean slate.
    Just me, my phone, and the familiar rhythm of autopilot behavior.

    So I doom-scroll,
    then blame myself for not being disciplined enough.
    I binge short videos, then act surprised when books feel heavy.
    I keep the “smart phone”, as if the name alone can save me from what it’s doing to my attention.

    Really? This is sooo laaaame

    Blackberry did pretty well for a while, then messed up, made a comeback, and guess who wants to use it now? Teens, not big executives.

    Yep, there are some signs that the new generation is kinda tired of smartphones (or maybe just wanna be cool), so they’re using old-school tech or minimalist new products.

    What really inspires me is that I truly believe that the generation clash to be different is always good for humanity. Refusing to go to war, to slave, or just blindly follow rules, breaking the “normal, natural, and necessary” stuff of each generation gives me hope.

    Other people have made cool stuff like the light or minimal phone (I love it), the AI Pin (so obviously lame), and even OpenAI is building something (though I’m kinda skeptical about what they’ll create).

    Because everything is connected now: my social life, work, entertainment, and education. It’s just easy to fall into small dopamine-triggering traps spread everywhere. It’s hard to escape. That’s the reason I’m quite skeptical any of those products will massively beat the smart phones we know today, unless they create a new vaccine to the dopamine loop.

    Saying “lame” is so big yikes!

    – Gen Alpha Diego

    Yeah, I know! “Lame” is a bit outdated, like smartphones, ;p

    The promise

    We were sold smartphones as mind-expanders, little rectangles full of tools, connections and possibilities. Right now, my smartphone doesn’t really do much of that.

    Somewhere along the way, those tools started shouting louder than our thoughts. I gave up attention for convenience. Depth for speed. Silence for noise. Control for the illusion of control.

    Some days I feel it happening… The thinning focus… The impatience.

    The absurd urge to check my phone even when I know there’s nothing waiting for me. It’s embarrassing to say out loud. But pretending I’m immune doesn’t make me any less fried.

    To scape that, my dream smart device would totally get what’s happening around me. If I’m walking or traveling, it’d help me find my way or capture cool moments. When I’m working, it’d help me stay focused and get things done. And when I’m chilling with friends, it’d make those times more special.

    And yet

    Here’s the strange twist,
    after all this doom and digital gloom,
    some tiny part of me
    is still optimistic.

    I don’t know if it’s resilience
    or delusion.
    Maybe my brain is happily rotten
    and still somehow hopeful.

    Maybe this rant
    is just to prove to myself
    that I can still think
    and rant.

    it’s that one neuron
    that refuses to give up,
    the plasticity
    being recycled daily.

    And yet,
    every day
    I see tools
    getting smarter.

    We, not…
    yet?

  • Classic Programmer Paintings

    ,
    “Senior software engineers fight technical debt while the last wave of scope creep is added in the background”

    From https://classicprogrammerpaintings.tumblr.com/