Making a product that Marl loves - Inverted Passion
A founder who raised VC funding for a habit coaching app explains why he shut it down and returned the money: apps have marginal influence on human behavior, and consumer products inevitably devolve into serving "Marl"—the distracted, dopamine-seeking marginal user with the attention span of a goldfish on acid.
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When designing a consumer product, you should consider every tap by a user to be a miracle. The motivation to stop using a new app will always be stronger than to use it To signup & complete a profile on Gas, we got it down to 15 taps total—with no keyboard required at any stage
They also don’t realize that yea I could keep going through thier onboarding flow, but timewise it’s competing with me looking at more dancing/cat videos on Tik Tok, and that is some seriously compelling content to compete with!
There’s some weird cognitive bias where product creators vastly overestimate how likely people are to do or pay attention to something based on how much the product creator wants them to, and they vastly underestimate how lazy people are.
To put it simply: you can look at a screen and intuitively predict the percent of users who will convert to the next screen within a 10% margin of error.
A dumb PM will stare at an onboarding funnel for hours, fabricate problems, create months of work for engineers, and ultimately improve conversion by 5%. A smart PM will look at funnel in a minute, make a button bigger, and improve conversion by 20%.
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TLDR
• The "Marl" framework: the marginal user has short attention span, needs instant gratification, has zero tolerance for complexity, and will always choose TikTok over self-improvement
• Duolingo makes $700M+ but isn't a language learning app—it's a game optimized for the marginal user (Reddit full of people "addicted" who can't speak the language)
• Economic reality: companies don't care about existing users, only the billion-plus-first user, so they optimize for the basest dopamine needs
• Concrete product principles: every tap is a miracle, keyboard input = failure, 15 taps max to activation with no typing required
• "Edutainment" fails because it's an oxymoron—you can't build "meaningful fun" at scale, and apps can't compete with friends/family/culture for behavior change
In Detail
The author built Nintee, an AI habit coaching app, raised VC funding, then shut it down and returned the money after realizing apps have marginal influence compared to friends, family, and culture. The core insight: consumer apps inevitably optimize for "Marl"—the marginal user with goldfish-on-acid attention span, zero tolerance for complexity, and constant need for dopamine hits. This isn't a minority—we're all Marl most of the day because using our brain is effortful.
The Duolingo case study reveals the pattern: despite $700M+ revenue, Reddit is full of users "addicted" who can't speak the language they're learning. Why? Because Duolingo optimized for game-like experience over actual learning. The economic incentive is clear: companies with billion-user products don't care about existing users, only the billion-plus-first marginal user. Since there's infinite "Marl time" (people mindlessly scrolling), that's where eternal growth comes from. Trying to appeal to people's "better parts" hits a ceiling; appealing to base dopamine needs is limitless.
The author's research yielded concrete product principles: every tap is a miracle (motivation to stop is always stronger than to continue), keyboard input kills conversion, and Gas got signup down to 15 taps with zero typing. The fundamental tension: "edutainment" fails because it's neither entertaining nor educational—you can't build "meaningful fun" at scale. The only successful skill-building app is Duolingo, which succeeded by becoming a game. For VC-backed startups, serving nerds with high-priced products works, but mass-market personal development on mobile requires serving Marl—and that's structurally incompatible with actually making people better.