Chris Hahn

Circonomit

I supported Circonomit in building their product to help companies understand the environmental impacts of their decisions.
I helped design an intuitive UX for users to build complex models, as well as the core data model and algorithm that enabled the analyses.
Left to pursue my own vision.

Purpose

Together with Julian Willner I cofounded Purpose. We built at the intersection of social and education aiming to reengineer social networking to be more meaningful and educational.
We iterated the product through two major iterations and gained deep understanding of what it means to build social products.
We followed strict principles of not compromising on our moral values and wanting to make a significant positive impact for our users, knowing full well that this significantly lowered our chances of success.
Our ultimate ambition was to create a social app that can sustain itself and its positive effects on users while being less harmful than existing apps.
By the end of 2023, I had to make the decision that I could not prove this to be possible.
My final verdict was that social is a market with massive untapped potential for good which will remain untapped due to competitive dynamics and the fundamentals of human psychology.
Users are not willing to pay for the social connections with people they already know and humans lack the mental strength to refrain from the addictive sides of social apps. At the same time, companies like Facebook and TikTok profit handsomely off this and can easily outcompete pretty much any upstart.
Other social apps can achieve brief spikes in engagement through novelty but only rarely will they be able to sustain this long enough and with sufficient scale to take market share away from the existing social apps. TikTok only really was able to achieve this due to the incredible scale of investment into customer acquisition and an even more addictive product.