Most people think product design and business models are separate things. When you look closer, they're really not.
The way a company makes money shapes every product decision it makes. If you make money selling ads, you optimize for time-on-screen. If you optimize for time-on-screen, you build features that create addiction—infinite scroll, algorithmic outrage, notification manipulation. The product and the business model are the same thing.
This is why most social platforms feel the way they do. They're not broken. They're working exactly as designed. The problem is that what's good for the business isn't good for the user.
When we built The Jump, we started with a different question: what if the business model allowed us to build a product perfectly aligned with what users actually want?
Our revenue came from brands—but not from traditional digital ads. Brands paid to create meaningful content, build communities, and engage people authentically. Think of it like a CRM embedded in a social platform. Brands built first-party relationships with real people who opted in—not impressions served to passive scrollers.
And here's what made those relationships more valuable: when someone chose to follow a brand or join one of their groups, that was a high-affinity person actively opting in. Not just an eyeball. Someone engaged, interested, and far more likely to act. That's worth more to a brand than a thousand impressions.
That changed everything about how we built the product.
We didn't need to create addiction because we didn't make money from time-on-screen. We could build the best possible features for users—customizable feeds, no ads, full control over notifications—because happy users meant better retention, which meant a more valuable platform for brand partners.
The incentives were aligned. The product reflected that.
Here's what I keep coming back to: you can't bolt on a good user experience after you've chosen an extractive business model. The model is the experience. If you want to build something people actually love, start with how you make money.