I think that’s important to say out loud, because some mornings I forget it, and I start acting like there’s a queue of people waiting for this thing. There isn’t. There’s me, a domain, a Substack, and a feeling I can’t quite put down.

No investor told me the market needs this. No focus group raised their hand. There’s no petition, no waitlist of thousands, no viral thread with people begging for exactly this. Just me, sitting with the sense that something’s a bit broken, and deciding (probably foolishly) to do something about it.

Which is terrifying, if I’m honest..

Because the voice in my head is pretty relentless about it. What if nobody wants this? What if you’re the only person who feels this way? What if you spend a year of evenings and weekends on something and people just shrug and carry on scrolling..?

I don’t have a neat answer. What I’ve got is a feeling, and a handful of conversations where someone said “yeah, actually, I’ve been thinking about that too”.

That might be enough.. It might not.. I genuinely don’t know yet..

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to, and the thing that’s made me actually open the laptop instead of just talking about it: I’m building this because I want it to exist. For me. I’m the user I’m building for. And if it turns out other people want it too, which I think they will, that’s the whole point.

That’s a different thing from “nobody asked for it.” Nobody asked for it, but I’m asking for it. I’m the one who’s tired of opening an app to see what my friends are up to and instead getting served three ads, a reel from someone I’ve never heard of, and a photo from a bloke I went to school with who I don’t think I’d recognise in the street now.

So what is it I’m actually building?

142 is a social app with a cap. You can have 142 friend connections. That’s it.

No followers. No follower count. No likes. No algorithm deciding what you see. No infinite scroll designed to keep your thumb moving after your brain has checked out. No “people you may know” quietly suggesting the ex you’ve spent two years not thinking about.

Just the people you actually chose, and the things they’re actually up to..

I know how that sounds. It sounds like I’m building the anti-app, and there’s a long graveyard full of anti-apps that nobody uses because they were built to be against something rather than for something. I’m trying very hard not to fall into that trap. I don’t want 142 to be “Instagram but annoyed.” I want it to be something that feels, when you open it, the way it felt to text your best friend back in the day before text messages had read receipts and everyone had eighteen group chats..

A small, warm, specific thing. Not a global feed. Not a town square. Just a place for your people..

And the reason I keep pushing on it, even when the doubt gets loud, is that every time I talk to someone about it, there’s this pause. A little one. Where their face changes and they go “huh.” And then they tell me something unprompted about how much time they waste on their phone, or how they’ve muted half their group chats, or how they haven’t seen a friend’s post in a while..

That pause keeps happening. And it keeps happening with different people, about different bits of the same underlying thing. I think that means something. (Or I’m very good at picking the right people to chat with. Probably a bit of both.)

There’s a version of this where I wait. Where I put up a landing page, collect emails, run some ads, try to “validate the idea” before writing a line of code. And I get why people do that. It’s sensible. It’s the done thing.

But I’ve done the sensible thing with other ideas and watched them die in the validation phase, because validation without a product is just a popularity contest for a promise. And promises are cheap. I’d rather build a scrappy version of the actual thing and show it to ten people I trust than have two thousand strangers tick a box saying they’d maybe use a better social network one day.

So the plan (and I use the word “plan” loosely, the way you might use it to describe “I’m going to start running more this year”) is roughly this:

Build small. Build ugly first. Get something onto a phone I can hand to a friend. Watch what happens. Fix the bit that made them frown. Hand it to someone else. Repeat until it either stops frowning or I do.

And write about it. That’s what this Substack is for. Not to manufacture a launch narrative or perform founder-ness at anyone, but because the writing keeps me honest, and it keeps me moving. If I’ve told you I’m building it, I have to actually build it. Which is the single most effective accountability trick I’ve found for me..

Here’s the question I’ve been sitting with for a few weeks now.

Is it okay to build something just because you want it to exist?

Not because a form full of strangers said they’d pay. Not because there’s a market gap with a neat little dollar sign in it. Just because you, personally, want to use the thing, and you’ve got a hunch a few people you know might too.

I’m going to argue yes. Not “yes, as a hobby” but “yes, as a reason to actually ship something.” Because the alternative (and I say this as someone who has absolutely lived the alternative) is that you spend your life scrolling through other people’s things and never making your own. And if I’m going to lose 30 days a year to my phone, I’d rather lose some of them to building than to watching.

If you’re building something nobody asked for too.. I really do get it. The uncertainty is mad. The little voice is loud. The spreadsheet doesn’t care about your feeling.

But the feeling is the reason you started. And I don’t think that’s as soft a reason as the business books make it sound.

I’ll let you know if I’m still saying that in six months.. hopefully you’ll be able to see before then anyway..

Matt

My best mate doesn’t know any of that. He’d probably guess golf and beers.. and to be honest.. he’d be partly right too.

So here’s the weird thing.. the algorithm knows my ‘preferences’ better than the people closest to me. But my best mate knows me. There’s a difference, and it took me a while to see it.

Knowing what content I’ll engage with isn’t the same as knowing who I am (at least I hope not).. The algorithm can predict what I’ll click, but it has no idea what I’m going through. It doesn’t know I’ve been a bit quiet lately. It doesn’t check in. It just serves more content.. keeping me (the hamster) going around the wheel.

My mate once rang me out of nowhere because I’d been quiet in the group chat for a few days. No reason. No agenda. Just.. “you alright?” That’s understanding. That’s someone noticing a gap and filling it with effort, not content.

The algorithm noticed I’d been quiet too.. though it just showed me more reels.

I think we’ve started confusing curation with connection. The feed feels personal because it’s tailored. But it’s not personal at all. It’s a multibillion pound machine doing maths, showing you things that keep your thumb swiping up.

And the mad thing is.. we let it. We open the app knowing exactly what’s going to happen. We’ll scroll for twenty minutes, see nothing that matters, close it, and then open it again eleven minutes later - just because.. It’s not connection. It’s not even entertainment half the time. It’s just a habit.. shaped by something smarter than us.

I caught myself the other day picking up my phone after a meeting at work for absolutely no reason. Not a notification. Not a message. Just my hand reached for it like some sort of reflex post meeting. I unlocked it, stared at the home screen for a second, opened Instagram, scrolled for about fifteen minutes, closed the app, and then remembered I’d originally picked the phone up to reply to a message I got during the meeting.

Fifteen minutes. Gone. On nothing. And the worst part isn’t the time, it’s that I didn’t even decide to do it. My thumb just knew where to go.

I’ve started trying not to scroll first thing in the morning or last thing at night. And I’ll be honest, it’s harder than it should be.. That’s probably the bit that bothers me most. Not that the algorithm is clever, but that it’s trained me so well I have to actively resist it. I have to make a conscious effort to not do something I never consciously chose to start doing in the first place. tip for you - leave your phone on charge outside your bedroom!

When you start noticing this stuff it’s hard to stop. You see it everywhere. You notice when you close an app and reopen it immediately.. not because anything’s changed but because your brain just wants another hit. You notice when a conversation reminds you of a reel you watched instead of something you actually experienced. You notice that your opinions on things you’ve never really thought about are weirdly strong, and you can’t quite remember where they came from..

That’s the bit that gets me. The algorithm doesn’t just take your time. It fills in the gaps where your own thoughts used to be.

Your best friend might send you a terrible meme at the wrong time about something you’re not even into.. for me it’s usually a post with cats or one of those ‘your birthday month is X’ things.. But there’s something in that randomness.. that imperfection.. that feels more human than any algorithm ever could.

Perfect relevance is actually kind of lonely. Because nobody chose it for you. Nobody thought of you. A system just calculated what would keep your attention the longest.

I’d rather get a bad recommendation from someone who actually gives a damn.. unless it’s cats. Please stop the cat posts.

Maybe what we actually need isn’t a smarter feed. Maybe it’s a smaller one.. with real people in it.

Friends from school I haven’t spoken to in a decade. People I met once at a party pre-covid. Colleagues from three jobs ago whose faces I genuinely can’t picture anymore. Most of them I’d never messaged. Ever. They were just there.. Taking up space.

I deleted over 400. Nobody texted to ask why. Nobody called. Nobody noticed. Why would they though, they’ve probably deleted me anyway..

Which tells you something, doesn’t it.

And it’s the same everywhere else. I had over a thousand followers on Instagram. When I post a story of my golf swing, maybe 800 people watch it. And there’s this little hit when you see that number.. proof that people are ‘interested’ in what I post, apparently.. if you can call it that anyway.. or maybe it’s just the feeling of being ‘seen’ by 800 people?

But do I actually want to share things with those 800 people? Would I tell them something real? Most of them are strangers, or people that I used to know (shout out Gotye). A few are exes. One is my friend’s mum who followed me in 2016 and I felt this kind of ego power trip over him because of it.. (sorry George..)

More is better, apparently. But when you actually look at who’s there.. most of them are just data. Names taking up space in your phone, faces taking up space in your feed.

The strange thing is how ‘normal’ this feels. How unremarkable it is to have hundreds of ‘connections’ you’d never actually connect with. To feel a small buzz when strangers watch your story, while the people who actually matter might not even see it.

I’m not sure what the right number is. But I know it’s not 1,391.

I’ll be in a conversation, confidently sharing my take on something.. ancient civilisations, some conspiracy theory, whatever.. and I’ll catch myself mid-sentence thinking “wait, where did I actually get this from?”

And the answer, honestly, is usually a 2-minute clip I saw three weeks ago. Or a podcast I half-listened to while making dinner. Or a post that got pushed to me because I’d lingered on something similar before.

I haven’t done the research. I haven’t read the counter-arguments. I haven’t sat with the idea and poked holes in it. I’ve just heard a thing and repeated it.. like a parrot with access to the internet and whatever it shows me.. squark squark..

Which raises a question I’m not sure I like - “is that my opinion? Or is it the opinion the algorithm decided to give me?”

I find ancient history genuinely fascinating. The unexplained stuff, the theories about lost civilisations, the questions about what we might have got wrong. I could talk about it for hours.

But if I’m honest.. I probably couldn’t defend any of it in a real debate with real substantial details. I don’t actually know all the ‘details’, I only knows those said in reels/podcasts/shorts/carousels.. I couldn’t cite sources (unless social media counts?). I just know the vibes. The headlines. The hook that made me stop scrolling for 90 seconds before the next thing grabbed me.

And yet somehow that’s enough for me to go around repeating it like I’ve “done my own research.”

I haven’t. I’ve done the algorithm’s ‘research’. Which is really just whatever kept me watching longest..

There’s a difference between forming a view and having one installed.

Forming a view takes effort. You read things that challenge you. You sit with discomfort. You change your mind sometimes. It’s slow and unglamorous and nobody gives you dopamine hits for doing it.

Having a view installed is effortless. You scroll, you absorb, you move on. The algorithm notices what makes you linger and serves you more of it. Not because it’s true or well-reasoned, but because it’s sticky.. Engaging.. Optimised.. Controversial..?

And slowly, without realising it, your head fills up with thoughts that feel like yours but arrived without invitation.

I don’t think this makes me a parrot exactly. That feels too dramatic.

But it does make me wonder how much of what ‘I believe’, I actually believe.. How many of my ‘opinions’ are just residue from content I consumed passively. How many conversations I’ve had where I was basically just forwarding someone else’s take in an attempt to be interesting/different/engaging in whatever social setting I was in at the time.

It’s a strange thing to sit with. The idea that you might not be the original author of your own thoughts.

This is part of why I’m building 142.

Not because an app can make you think harder. It can’t. That’s on you.

But maybe the algorithm shouldn’t be the one deciding what ideas get loaded into your head in the first place. Maybe connection shouldn’t be algorithmically optimised for engagement. Maybe there’s a version of this where you’re not just passively receiving.. One where the people you hear from are people you’ve actually chosen, saying things they actually mean to you specifically.

I don’t know if that solves the parrot problem. But it feels like a start.

Matt

The average person spent 141 minutes on social media in 2025. Over 35 days. That’s mad.. the same hours as a part-time job.

I think you know the feeling. The muscle memory of pulling down to refresh. The little hit when something interesting appears. The slow deflation when nothing does (or maybe that’s just my internet connection..). The way you just thought you’d spend 10 minutes before bed, but somehow it’s 2:36am and you’re not quite sure where the “10 minutes” went.. or what you got from it.

I’d close the app feeling vaguely empty. Not angry, not sad. Just less than when I opened it.. if that’s a thing?

And here’s what took me longer to notice: I wasn’t connecting with anyone. What even is connection on ‘social media’? I was just.. observing. Watching clips of podcasts. History clips. Sport clips. Clips of people I subconsciously compare myself to because they’re my age and seem to have their life together.. albeit on a video.. but that still counts no?

But the actual people I cared about? My family, my close friends, the people whose ordinary days I actually wanted to see? I had no idea what was happening in their lives.

The algorithm had long stopped showing me people I actually knew. It was influencers, ads, strangers having arguments, people competing for attention. My actual friends? They’d either stopped posting or got buried under the noise.

I guess people don’t post unless it’s perfect. So the ordinary stuff.. the stuff I actually want to see.. never makes it.

The scroll wasn’t connection. It was a very convincing imitation of it.

So instead of just scrolling.. I started thinking.. Thinking led to building.. Which led to this post..

It’s called 142. I’m not going to over-explain it here. Partly because it’s still being built, partly because I’d rather show you than tell you. But the short version: it’s a way to stay close to the people who actually matter. No followers. No likes. No infinite scroll. Just the 142 people you genuinely want in your life. And a reason to actually hear from them.

That’s the idea, anyway.

I don’t know exactly where this goes. The app might work. It might not. Some days I think it’s the best idea I’ve ever had.. other days I wonder what I’m doing. But building it has already taught me things I didn’t expect. And I figured the best way to make sense of it was to write about it.. out loud, in public, as it happens.

So that’s what this is. An experiment in building something, and documenting what I learn along the way.

If that sounds interesting, stick around. I’ll be posting every few weeks.

And if you’ve ever felt that strange emptiness after an hour of scrolling.. maybe you can help me figure this out.

Matt