Minimally viable, distraction-freeing personal device
Minimalist, distraction-freeing personal device with just barely enough functionality for you to leave the house and navigate the modern world for several hours
The average person spends 9 hours a day staring at screens, every day of their life.
The omnipresence of screens in the iPhone era has cratered mental health and rewired our brains for the worse, severing us from ever living fully in the present or enjoying the moment together while compulsively addicting us to scrolling & dopamine hits which fractures our attention span to milliseconds. People’s attention spans and cognitive performance even degrade even just when their phone is in the same room or in their general vicinity.
The first signs of revolt are seriously picking up steam.
Big Tech will continue to fight all these actions in the courts and lobbies, but we expect them to only continue to gain momentum as they’re at the convergence of several of the most societally core trends: mental health and isolation crises, anti-Big Tech sentiment, and reversion against the digital world.
Outside the courts, we see social clues around us that such “touching grass” sentiments may be shifting from uncool to less socially stigmitized.
Millennials and GenZs are desparately grasping for a sense of community, identity, and mental health fixes.
Run and sauna clubs. SoHo House. The return of religious affiliation. Guided psychodelics. De-stigmization of therapy and SSRIs. Kids going viral for reinventing meditation from first principles by “raw dogging life” without looking at a screen for an hour. A guy going viral for doing a year without screens and measuring his brain with MRI along the way. The dumb phone for kids Tin Can selling out immediatley upon release. Voluntary installation of apps to limit their screentime. Phone-free concerts and dance parties. We could easily imagine strictly phone-free bars becoming a major trend (especially if booze-less bars can).
More broadly, Millennials and GenZs are already unusually captivated by health hacks like cutting down drinking, tracking health data with wearables, sugar-free / protein-rich, etc., etc.
Product Design Space
The problem is that a modern computing device has become existentially important to navigating the modern world. Imagine spending a whole day in NYC without a phone. No Ubers, Citi bike, no Google Maps or directions, no important calls/texts, etc. It’s not really possible even if all you want to do is go to the park for a day.
We’re keenly interested in a device specifically designed for people to unplug while still having the minimally viable functionality for people to navigate their daily lives for at least a few hours.
To be clear, we don’t expect such a device to replace your phone or smart glasses if those truly are the next platform. There will always be a miniaturized supercomputer on people’s bodies. Instead, this device is meant to help people get some space from that distraction for a few hours, whether that be going to the park or a social setting.
What’s a minimally viable device need?
Beyond that, any additional functionality comes down to interesting decisions about product positioning. Things like music verge into the grey area of how strictly one wants to define “unplugging” and how crucial such a given functionality is to adoption.
Should you include a camera? Maybe it could one that takes photos in the style of a film camera or a disposable. That way it’d provide an entirely different user experience than a smartphone camera — one that the targeted demographic absolutely adores. Moreover, customers wouldn’t expect a SotA iPhone-quality camera which would be impossibly expensive to deliver. Returning to older, simpler technology also fits nicely with the device’s premise. You could even try engagements gimmicks like the photos only show up on your phone 24 hours after or maybe the delete after 24 hours.
Do you want to include health trackers like an Oura ring (whose functionality was replicated in the open source for $25)? That taps into millennials’ health focus and makes the device multifunctional but muddies the marketing pitch away from a pure focus on mental health and presence.
You could even go all in on making the Ultimate Virtue Signaling Device™ for rich techies. One that’s presence-preserving, health-tracking, and sends you power thoughts in the morning as you admire yourself in the mirror. Then charge a ton for it.
We’re open minded to founder’s insights on exact functionality set.
No matter what though, the company’s core competency must be truly world-class marketing.
It must make the desire for presence cool.
It must strike the right high profile celebrity endorsements (shouldn’t too hard to find some that genuinely care about their kid’s screen time), infiltrate hip concert venues and bars, etc. There’s also some natural ways to drive engagement like a train station-style clock that counts the hours of your life that you’ve saved. It ticks up only when it senses you’ve picked up the device. That data could even be socialized in a Strava sort of gamified leaderboard.
Maybe if phone-free bars become a major trend, the device could quickly & easily authenticate that you don’t have your phone on you for the bouncer because it’s connected to your phone’s bluetooth.
All in all, you could produce such a device for ~$25 since the necessary chips are a few dollars a pop, and as disconnecting to reconnect is a rich person problem, you could sell the device for ~$300.
However, customers would need to subscribe to an ongoing cellular subscription of ~$10-15, which feels like a barrier to adoption for a device not expected to be used constantly. Maybe Helium could offer cheaper plans:)
The dumb phone for kids called Tin Can sold out immediately. They also have the gimick useful from a company perspective that they can only call other Tin Cans.
A Berkeley grad we talked to taught himself how to made a device from scratch with more functionality than described above and designed it to be maximally cute, colorful and fun. He got 1M views which suggests some appetite for the idea.
https://www.thelightphone.com/
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-get-so
