How I Am Doing Everything WRONG. On porpoise.

In Paul Graham’s probably “most famous” essay he told us to ‘Do Things That Don’t Scale.’ Literally no one follows that advice, ever, and ironically (or… is it…?) the most famous accelerator in the whole wide world (Y Combinator/YC) aggressively, cultishly insists that you do exactly 100% the opposite of his advice.

So! I’m building an app which does everything wrong. WRONGO.

On porpoise. Because acktshually the essay was correct, and the cargo cult is… well… a capitalist cult.

I’m building Taleway wrong. Catastrophically, hilariously, intentionally wrong. No login. No user profiles. No UI to speak of. No engagement loop. No growth hack. No monetization. According to every playbook written since 2007, I’m building a company that cannot possibly succeed. Good.

Those playbooks are toilet paper, because the world has changed and the cargo cult hasn’t caught up yet.

Today, 2025, we are awash in an entire global underclass of wannabe founders all building the same hot, predictable garbage. Every one of these poor bastards is following the same YouTube course on “How I Built a $10K MRR SaaS in 30 Days.” Everybody is using the same Cursor + Vercel + Stripe stack. All building another pathetic email optimizer or PDF tool or AI wrapper, or “I book appointments for you,” or “I weed your Slack messages for you.”

Claude Code, thanks, but… ugh. The democratization of code didn’t democratize innovation. It democratized aggressive regression to the mean.

In the beginning, YC seemed to be about badass technical founders. Now? Drones who can speedrun the playbook fastest. Entrepreneurship turned into a McDonald’s franchise model.

Blech.

Now half a billion people can paint by numbers. Congratulations, you’ve made entrepreneurship into data entry. So, what’s left?

  • Genuinely hard technical problems (fusion, cancer, quantum, getting a roofer who will return calls)
  • Legit hard operational problems (making enterprise software not induce thoughts of self-harm)
  • Authenticity. Hard human problems (creating actual joy)

Here’s the vice grip: Delight doesn’t scale. Joy isn’t an API. Wonder can’t be A/B tested.

The dopamine dealers have won the war, to our detriment, friends. Infinite scroll, variable reward schedules, push notifications. Solved problems. Every app is equally addictive now, and we all secretly know it, and we all secretly hate the fucking grift of it. We know we’re being used. Go on, admit it.

But delight? That requires taste. Craft. Giving a shit. Things that can’t be taught in a YouTube course or generated by ChatGPT.

The Entrepreneurship McDonald’s Value Meal Menu

This is YC. We genuflect to “Do Things That Don’t Scale.” Saint Graham, preserve us. So mote it be.

THEN THEY TOTALLY DO THE OPPOSITE.

  • Find network effects (only works at scale)
  • Build viral loops (scaling again)
  • Track cohort retention (um, measuring scale)
  • Focus on unit economics (shocker, requires scale)
  • “How does this become a billion dollar company?” (literally just asking about scale)

The cognitive dissonance makes your eyes bleed. But no one mentions it because everyone’s too busy building the same B2B SaaS with “AI” on top like wood pulp parmesan sprinkled on shitty microwave pizza.

They might as well have a drive-thru:

“Welcome to YCombinator, may I take your order?” “Yeah, I’ll have the B2B SaaS Combo with a side of AI features.” “Would you like to add network effects for just $2M more dilution?” “Sure.” “Can I interest you in our viral loop special?” “Obviously.” “Your total is 17% equity. Please proceed to Demo Day window.”

So I’m doing it all WRONG.

Sin #1: No Accounts

You know what nobody says at a cocktail party? ‘I wish I had more passwords to manage.’ But every app demands you create an account like it’s 2003 and we haven’t figured out that identity is prison. Hell, my REFRIGERATOR wants me to create an account. My CAR does too. I’m literally choking on accounts. So. Taleway starts the moment you open it. No signup flow. No onboarding. No ‘verify your email.’ It just fucking works. Like a radio. Only old people like me remember those, but man. It was easy.

Account systems are about owning you, not utility. And in 2025, everyone is wise to this. Users are done being owned.

Sin #2: No UI

My entire interface is: open app, voila, hear stories. That’s it. No hamburger menu with 47 options you’ll never use. No settings screen with enough toggles to launch a spacecraft. No pull-to-refresh, no infinite scroll, no outrage downvote buttons. The UI is so minimal it makes Dieter Rams look like a hoarder.

Because why? Every pixel of UI is an admission of failure. It’s you saying “our product is so complex you need a control panel.” Imagine if your car had a settings menu for how the engine works.

Sin #3: No Engagement Metrics

Here’s the metric that matters to me: Did you learn something interesting while your brain was otherwise dying? But try explaining that to someone who just asked about your ‘north star metric.’

Sin #4: No Monetization

“‘What’s your revenue model?’ they ask. “Hell if I know yet,” is my answer. Maybe subscriptions? Sponsorships? Patreon? Maybe city partnerships. Maybe audio ads that don’t make you want to drive into oncoming traffic. Maybe I’ll figure it out when I have a million people using it. You know, like every successful platform ever did before MBAs convinced us to monetize before we know what the heck we’re doing.

You’re Just Being Contrary, This Will Die

Maybe so.

But the entire armature of modern app development, like accounts, engagement loops, the dark patterns, the metrics dashboards that look like NORAD… All of it exists to solve one problem: efficiency. Every ‘best practice’ is optimized for showing you ads.

However, ::cough:: it’s 2025. Advertising “as such” is dying. Apple killed IDFA. Google’s about to deprecate cookies. CPMs are in freefall. The entire economic foundation that justified these patterns is crumbling. Yet everyone’s still building apps like it’s 2015. ChatGPT is your new digital livingroom. Ads are so… last century.

Maybe I am “building wrong”. But I’m building for what’s next. When advertising can’t pay for software, software has to actually provide value. Heresy, I know. I’m building for joy.

My Prophecy

Am I fucking up Taleway? Absolutely. But in exactly the right way. The same way we fucked up at Room Key by not using Java. The same way I fucked up at TypeZero by not taking 10 years to ship. Sometimes the best strategy is to be wrong about everything except the only thing that matters: what the world looks like next.

Interested? Visit https://taleway.xyz. Drop me a line and I’ll send you an invite to the TestFlight beta.

Or don’t! Go outside, take off your shoes and put your feet on actual grass. That’s joy, too.