The things we decided not to build

Most product decisions are reversible and most of them do not matter much. A handful set what the thing becomes, and those are worth writing down in public so that the version of me in six months, looking at a flat usage chart, has to argue with this post before shipping the obvious fix.

Here are the ones I am holding.

There is no composer

Nothing in this product writes straight to an audience. There is no box that says what is on your mind, and there will not be one.

This is the decision everything else hangs off. A composer changes what gets written, immediately and permanently, because writing to an audience is a performance and writing something down is not. The moment there is a box pointed at other people, the things that go in it are the things that play well, and a page full of things that play well is worth nothing to the recruiter trying to work out whether you are any good.

What you write here goes into your own collection first. Whether anyone ever sees it is a separate decision you make once, per audience, and the page only speaks when somebody asks it something. That order is the product.

There is exactly one box in the whole thing that looks like a composer, the reply box in a room, and it obeys the same rule underneath: your reply is a thing written into your own collection that the room is allowed to read. You can retire it from your own side. It is never counted on your page.

There are no points, streaks or badges

Somebody asks for this every time I demo it, usually as a growth idea, and it is the easiest one to refuse.

The day a number goes up when you add a thing, people add things to make the number go up. That is not a cynical prediction, it is the entire observed history of every product that has tried it. And in this case what gets added to make the number go up is a sentence about you that you would not defend, sitting in a collection whose only value is that everything in it is true.

A streak is worse, because it makes the number go up on a schedule. Now you are writing on a Tuesday night because the streak is at eleven. Nothing good has ever been written for that reason.

There is no ranking, and no count of who asked about you

No most interesting page in your field. No leaderboard. No number on your page saying how many people asked about you this week where anyone else can see it.

Two reasons, and the second one is the one people miss.

The first is the same as above: ranked attention is a scoreboard, and a scoreboard reshapes what gets written.

The second is that a count of askers is not a fact about you. It is a fact about them. Three people asking about layoffs at a company this month is information about those three people, and publishing it, even as a number, even anonymously, is a disclosure they did not agree to. Your own log is yours because they asked you. A public counter is something else.

You can see everything your own page was asked, and the small reach report on your page is yours alone. It goes no further.

There is no waiting list and no invite scoreboard

When I looked at gating the product for a beta, the tempting version was the usual one: a list, a position on it, a referral counter that moves you up. It manufactures urgency and it costs nothing.

It also would have made the first thing anybody did here a growth action rather than a real one. So the invite, when there is one, is a question. Somebody who has a page mails one real question to one person who does not, and that question is the first thing on their page when they arrive, and the person who asked it hears back when it is answered. Asking is never gated at all, because askers are the reason any of this is worth having.

What I will build instead when growth is flat

The honest risk with a post like this is that it reads as principle until the numbers hurt. So, specifically: when I want more out of this, the things I am allowed to reach for are making a page answer better, making it easier to say the true thing, and getting real questions in front of people who can answer them.

Anything that makes a number go up on the writer's side of the screen is off the table. It is not a matter of taste. It is that the only asset here is a collection of things that are true, and every one of those mechanisms is a way of paying people to put something else in it.

Make a page, and notice what is not there.