· 2 min read
Why there is no feed, and never will be
A feed would make the product more engaging and worse. Here is what a feed does to behaviour, and why an app for two people cannot have one.
Every product that reaches a certain size is asked the same question: where is the community. It is a reasonable question and the answer here is that there will not be one.
What a feed does to writing
The moment a third person can see something, the writing changes. Not sometimes. Always, and usually below the level of a decision.
Sentences get tidier. Complaints get funnier. Difficulty gets shaped into something that reads well. A person writing about a hard week for an audience produces a better paragraph and a less accurate one.
For a product whose entire value is that two people say what is actually true, that is not a minor side effect. It is the thing being destroyed.
An audience of one you live with produces honesty. An audience of strangers produces performance. You cannot have both in the same box.
What a feed does to a couple
It introduces comparison, which is corrosive in a specific way here.
Couples already compare themselves to other couples using the least reliable data available: the outside of other people's relationships. A feed would systematise that, and it would do it with material selected by the people who post most, who are not a representative sample.
It also creates an incentive to present the relationship, and a couple that is presenting a relationship has acquired a second relationship to maintain.
What a feed does to us
This is the less flattering part and it is the real reason.
A feed is the standard way to increase time in an app. It works. If we had one, we would look at the numbers, and the numbers would tell us that people who scroll stay longer, and every subsequent decision would be shaped by that.
We would not decide to make the product worse. We would make a hundred reasonable decisions, each defensible, and arrive somewhere else entirely.
The safest way to avoid that is not to build the thing that generates the incentive.
The features that follow from not having one
No profiles, because there is nobody to show them to.
No likes or reactions from anyone outside the pair.
No discovery, no search for other users, no suggestions.
No streaks or public counters. Streaks are a good engagement mechanic and a bad thing to put on a relationship, because they convert a habit into a record that can be broken, and the day it breaks is the day people stop.
And an experience that ends. You answer, you read, you are finished. There is nothing underneath.
What we do instead
The blog, which is a one-way channel and is not a community. Support by email. And occasionally publishing what we have learned, in aggregate and without anything drawn from what couples write, which we could not do anyway because we cannot read it.
The trade-off, stated honestly
It costs us growth. Social features are how products spread without paying for distribution, and a product with no sharing mechanic has to be told about by people who liked it.
That is a slower business. It is the one that is compatible with the product actually working.
Questions people ask
- Why does Duoheart have no social features?
- Because an audience changes how people write. The product depends on two people writing honestly, which does not survive the presence of a third party.
- Are there streaks or engagement rewards?
- No. Streaks convert a habit into a record that can be broken, and the day it breaks is usually the day people stop.
- Could a community feature be added later?
- No. The absence of a feed is a constraint on what the product can become, and it is deliberate for that reason.
