My family and I watched the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. Axe-grinding aside, it was sobering and enlightening. I started watching it “through my fingers” as it were, because I felt somewhat culpable in that Daycast is also a service built on the internet. But later I realized that there is a fundamental difference between what the merry band of makers at Daycast is attempting and what many other internet app teams are attempting. More than just a difference, it’s a 180-out-of-phase goal mismatch. It is this: Social-network based apps or related devices are driven by the engagement of their users. In order to succeed at selling your attention to advertisers, they must gain more and more of your attention. In contrast, with Daycast, we want to take as little of your attention as possible. Daycast use is not the point; your productivity and well-being is. We want to maximize the latter with minimal investments in the former.

Then I realized that it’s not just social apps we differ from: games, collaborative tools, (micro)blogging, search, streaming media, etc. All of these major categories of application have user-engagement (aka attention stealing) as a primary or at least secondary metric.

This is our Dilemma: We want to reduce daily per-user Daycast engagement. Daycast’s fundamental assumption is that you have important things to do with your 24 hours and Daycast use is not primary among them. This fact places us in conflict with much of our industry, and it makes me wonder how often we here at Open Door Teams look at things (outreach, UX design, SEO, CRM, etc.) through the lens of the engagement-maximizing assumptions simply because the business-building products and advice we most often bump into are geared that way? We’re swimming in a veritable sea of tools, tips, and shiny success stories. But how much of it mirrors the tactics exposed in The Social Dilemma?

Note to self: I need to make sure we are looking in the right places for tools and advice in growing Daycast’s influence. Typical SAAS-advice may be antithetical to our goals.

Photo by Jason Rosewell