Soup

The TLDR is this: as AI slop destroys public digital spaces, people retreat to gatekept, curated networks of value creation - the group chat. Once everyone decentralizes into their group chats, your digital marketing playbook breaks. Product metrics break. Soup has the solution.

I firmly believe that the loneliness epidemic is a choice. You cannot get a thriving social life without risking a little embarrassment or rejection. The youth need to stop being weenies and throw more parties.

One of my strongest beliefs right now is that "friendship as a service" will give you the greatest shot at AI proofing yourself. In other words, offering or building something where the majority of the value is intangible, where the moat lies in your ability to nurture connection Help someone perform a task more quickly, accurately, or efficiently? You're competing against code that can run 24/7 without getting tired. As long as success is able to be quantified through hard metrics such as ratios and percentages, Claude will perpetually eat your lunch But if someone just finds themselves enjoying your presence for some inexplicable reason? You immediately shield yourself from the threat of competition because the value of a genuine connection is unable to be tangibly quantified, and this especially rings true with how robotic and artificial the world is starting to feel These tools, those products, they can all be compared amongst one another based off of which ones can save someone the most money and time. You can never win this game from a features standpoint. So instead, what can you intangibly provide, or how can you provide something tangible but with an intangible twist? All goes back to relationships Maybe you started a business teaching people how to do something. Couldn't they just learn it themselves by watching a tutorial video or talking to ChatGPT? Of course, but what if you showed up to their house to do it in person? Maybe even brought some food to share? Gave them your number and allowed them to text you about other tangentially related things? Just so refreshingly "non transactional" in energy that they couldn't help but bring you up around others? Could you create a situation where with the people you work with, you consistently leave them feeling more excited, assured, inspired after every session or touchpoint? How could you provide value in a way where the value would significantly decrease if it wasn't specifically you who was providing that value? This is how I'm thinking about all of this. And yes, thinking about it like this doesn't necessarily maximize "scale," but I would argue that the unscalable is exactly what most people are overlooking because it seems like you're "slowing down" in a society that constantly forces you to get ahead. This is my "zig when they zag" bet, and only time will tell whether I'm directionally correct or not

a series of schemes does not make an investable company

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‘Soup’ was a slang term for drugs that were injected into a horse to make it run faster. A racehorse that was on PEDs was said to be ‘souped up.’ We now use the term to refer to anything that is enhanced.

It does feel like generative AI is just going to make the internet unusable to a degree that pushes a lot of us off of it and back into the real world