When we were building The Jump, we made a decision that seemed counterintuitive: we weren't going to steal people's attention.
Most social platforms are built on a simple model. Get users. Keep them scrolling. Sell ads against the time they spend. The longer someone stays, the more money you make—regardless of whether that time was valuable to them. This creates an arms race of dark patterns: infinite scroll, autoplay, notification manipulation, algorithmic feeds designed to trigger emotional reactions.
Sean Parker, Facebook's founding president, said it directly: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" The "like" button was designed to create a dopamine hit—a social-validation feedback loop that exploits human psychology.
We decided to go the other way. Our premise was simple: what if the product had to be good enough that people chose to come back? No manipulation. No psychological tricks. Just something worth using.
This raised the bar on everything. Our content had to be genuinely interesting. Our features had to solve real problems. Our communities had to provide actual value to the people in them. We couldn't rely on addiction—we had to rely on quality.
The result was 60%+ retention. People stayed because they wanted to, not because we'd hijacked their reward systems.
Here's the business case: when you earn attention instead of stealing it, you get a different kind of user. They're there on purpose. They're engaged because they want to be. That makes them more valuable to partners, more likely to participate, more likely to recommend you to friends.
The platforms that figure out how to build sustainable businesses on earned attention will win in the long run. Team Scout is built on the same principle—we're not trying to maximize time-on-platform. We're trying to help coaches run their programs efficiently and get back to their actual lives.