Making things that last
Lately I've had a lot of time for thinking. Partially because I shut down Blymp back in January and freed up a lot of my mental resources. No clients to follow up with. No admin stuff to stress about. But thinking is also my favourite activity, and there'll always be time in my day for a good old mind-bending. So I sat down, as I often do, alone with my thoughts, and wrote about what business I should and, most importantly, should not consider doing next.
The list you are about to read might be similar to Core principles I (try to) live by that I wrote one similarly pensive evening two years ago. Whether it's a comparison or a continuation is hard to say—still, one can't be without the other to show the inexorable passage of time that changed everything and nothing for me all at once.
But it also serves another purpose: to remind me in the future, before I get myself involved in some dubious enterprise, what painful mistake I'm about to make by ignoring my values. So here it is, the list.
My next business shouldn't (and hopefully won't) be about:
- Social Media. Enough of this crap.
- Some productivity bullshit. Do better, not more.
- Fast fashion and consumerism. Truly, I've already bought everything you wanted to sell me.
- Some “hack your health” app. Our bodies haven't changed much in the last three hundred thousand years, and they won't change in the next hundred.
- Or any other app, really. I don't even use my phone anymore.
- Distracting things and things that require constant attention.
- Some LLM wrapper with a fancy UI. Indefensible. The number of things I can do with ChatGPT or Claude is ridiculously high. It can surely handle one more thing.
What it should (and hopefully will) be about:
- Sustainable, high-quality products
- Unscented products
- Building community
- Bringing people together, offline
- Empowering creativity
- Replacing animal products
- Doing one thing really damn well
- Small acts of kindness
- Things you can touch
- Things that last
- Clothes made of natural fibres
- Art
- Fun
- Questioning the status quo
- Simple, intentional living
- Deeper understanding of self
- Spending more time in nature
- Spending more time with loved ones
Things and businesses I get inspired by:
- Framework: Sustainable/repairable laptops.
- Bitwarden: Open-source software that does one job really well and charges me a reasonable amount of money per year.
- Danish design: Beautiful. Sturdy. Timeless. I brought home two Royal Copenhagen mugs the other day.
- Bike-sharing and car-sharing. Literally anything-sharing.
- ZSA keyboards. What a keyboard should have always been.
- A water bottle that won't leak on a plane. Some random-brand bottle bricked my friend's MacBook, and I've been appreciative ever since of the fifty-dollar water bottle that I bought years ago, so hesitant about the price.
- Coffee. One of those timeless things on Earth.
- Kobo. It's like Kindle that doesn't decide what's best for you. Upload your own PDF. Or EPUB—whatever. It has physical buttons to flip pages. Best $200 I ever spent.
- A high-quality safety razor. It's just so nice to hold.
- A Japanese stainless-steel knife. So nice to hold, too.
There are numerous other things that I appreciate having in my life that didn't make it into this list for some reason or another. A familiar mom-and-pop shop in my neighbourhood. A Timemore Black Mirror kitchen scale that just works, every time. A random USB-C charged electronic device that spares me from carrying an extra cable. My radically outdated ten-dollar Casio watch. An old pair of comfy shoes that just won't die.
We need more of this in our lives. Things that you desperately look to buy again when they get lost or break or fall apart. Things that someone made a deliberate effort to get right the first time. The quintessence of art and craftsmanship. For all the genius of Steve Jobs, the iPhone wasn't that. It challenged the status quo and was surely a groundbreaking, outstanding piece of technology at the time of its first release. But in twenty years, people won't remember it ever existed. Like Gen Z doesn't remember the Walkman.
I'd like to see more businesses that bet on doing one thing really well. Google could still have been the company people remembered for the best search engine if they had doubled down solely on that. Instead, we don't even know what they do anymore: Phones? Clouds? Ads? Certainly ads. I still remember the feeling of holding one of the first PocketBook e-readers in my hands back in Moscow. Pressing its buttons and waiting for what now seems like a torturous three seconds before the screen refreshed. Almost twenty years later and every day still, Kobo gives me exactly that feeling.
So hopefully, my next business is the one that lasts.