On building things for people

Notes on building things for people

from my airtime at the Heads Up with Hinge conference

Sari Azout

Oct 17, 2026

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Today’s post was scheduled and ready to go last night. But this morning I received a voice note from a Sublime member and it belongs at the top of this issue.

We don’t know other people’s stories, but we know our own

, and we know our lives are fierce and complex.

It’s easy to forget that the people on the other side of our products have lives as rich and tangled as ours.

0:00

-0:58

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Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the

Heads Up

conference by Hinge (yes, the dating app). The theme was designing solutions for what they call “the closeness crisis

”

the widening gap between how digitally connected people are and how close they feel to others.

The president of the NY Public Library was on the panel, and it was very cool to manifest future Sublime-somethings. Most of my air time was spent voicing my frustration with measurement culture and short-termism. You can read condensed notes below.

Heads Up by Hinge

P.S. I’ll be back in NYC this Wednesday, October 21 hosting an event with the fab crew at

Air

. If you’re around, come hang!

RSVP here

.

Notes

It’s easy to measure what people do with your product. It’s much harder to measure what your product is doing to people. Case in point: the voice note I shared above! Nothing in yesterday’s metrics would have told me that was happening. Attempts to evaluate systems favor what’s quick and possible to collect at scale (likes, views) rather than what actually matters but can’t be measured.

Because qualities like creativity, flow, love, aliveness, usefulness, connection, and joy are hard to measure, companies pick proxy metrics. Clicks are a proxy for “did I read this,” time spent is a proxy for “did I enjoy this.” Engineers can’t do much with “make Sublime feel sublime,” but they can do a lot with “increase the number of things people save to Sublime.”

The problem with proxy metrics is they distort the incentives. You start with good intentions, like the desire for quality journalism. So you pick a metric, like clicks, and that leads to the proliferation of click-bait content. Or you want to measure whether an ad resonates, so you measure how long someone saw the ad, which results in weird tactics to game people into seeing the ad.

Your numbers might look good even if your customers aren’t enjoying your platform.

I love this description from Max Bennett on dopamine culture:

“Dopamine is less about liking things and more about wanting things”.

The extreme culmination of this incentive system is the

wait-for-it

genre of Reels that artificially delay the arrival of the actual point of the video. OR even worse, the videos where nothing happens.

Freddie deBoer wrote about this

. It’s hard to believe the original contract of connecting people through social media resulted in this:

I am hesitant to offer solutions, but I think defining your values clearly enough that you can use them as a decision-making filter is extremely important. Every creator starts out with a vision, a belief system, a set of values, a desire. Then business gets hard and you’re just struggling to survive and meet next quarter’s numbers and you forget why you started in the first place.

I’ve felt frantic and anxious at various stages in building Sublime. But I’ve always been clear about my values and my definition of success. For me, success means building a sustainable company that embodies the intangible cultural properties that matter to me. I’d like for people to come to Sublime and say:

“I feel intellectually nourished and creatively inspired here.”

A statement as simple as this can act as a decision-making filter.

Streaks? No, they incentivize showing up every day regardless of whether you’re getting anything out of it. When you gear your business around the quantifiable, the numbers in the short-run might not reflect what is lost, but your customers will definitely feel its absence. Business decisions have an aftertaste! An insane stat is that the average company lasts 15 years in the S&P! Clearly short-term, data-driven culture isn’t generating long term business value.

Here’s a great example of the limits of data-driven culture, from Groupon:

On defining your values, I thought this conversation with the founder of Duolingo was interesting. He says he is willing to sacrifice education for engagement, because you can’t teach someone who isn’t there. I think this is a valid position, but it’s not mine. You have to define what scale turns you on. Does a million lives turn you on?

The market of people that will love and pay for an app like Sublime that is designed to not be addictive is small, but presumably we will mean more to those people. How many people you touch > how many people you reach.

source: Vox

I love the idea that something can make our lives richer while barely registering in the numbers. But I’m also not 100% sure what to do with this, I have three children to feed.

David Deutsch

One of the silver linings of AI I am observing is a shift away from measurement culture. Everything AI does tends to be the most optimized business decision, and the people who insist that every decision should be metrics driven would be admitting that their job can be automated by AI. This is one reason we’re seeing all this talk about taste, judgment, etc.

Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, who passed away in 2022 was very early to these ideas. (His

archive

is a treasure trove!).

In the years ahead we must get beyond numbers and the language of mathematics to understand, evaluate, and account for such intangibles as learning, intellectual capital, community, beliefs, and principles, or else the stories we tell of the value and prospects of our institutions will be increasingly false.

Also love this from the Head of Marketing at Shinola (via

Rachel Karten

):

Thank you Hinge for inviting me to share these ideas that have been banging against my ribs for years!

See you soon in NYC?

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