It’s easy to forget, as we scroll endlessly through feeds engineered to be bottomless, that the internet was once a different place entirely. Before engagement metrics ruled our time, before algorithms dictated our attention, and before we were all involuntary participants in a psychological experiment run by trillion-dollar companies, there was something more sincere about being online. This recognition wasn’t born in a moment of crisis, but in a quiet accumulation of dissonance years of trying to build platforms that never quite felt right. Eventually, I stopped trying to build things I didn’t believe in and started asking a deeper question: what should we have built in the first place?
I was reading Slow Productivity by Cal Newport at the time a book that challenges the manic pace we’ve all come to normalize. It wasn’t a eureka moment, but a loosening. The book helped me reflect on the last ten years of building, tinkering, and, frankly, failing. Not because the ideas were bad. Not because the execution was flawed. But because the thing I was chasing wasn’t real. I wasn’t trying to build something for me. I was trying to reverse engineer what I thought people wanted based on what already existed. The irony, of course, is that the things that already existed were the problem.
At some point, you realize that trying to replicate the thing you quietly despise is a special kind of madness. And yet, so many of us do it. We look at the success of Instagram, or Twitter, or TikTok, and assume their dominance proves their rightness. But scale is not virtue. And virality is not meaning. The mere fact that something is addictive does not make it good for us.
What I came to see was that the social media experience most of us had grown up with particularly those of us old enough to remember the wild, exploratory weirdness of early internet communities had been slowly replaced by a system that disincentivized vulnerability, discouraged originality, and replaced curiosity with conformity. Platforms that once invited us to express ourselves had become machines that extracted us for a few dollars.
Lavish Made is, in some sense, a refusal. It is a rejection of the idea that social connection must come bundled with metrics, manipulation, and monetization. It’s an attempt to recreate something we lost not purely out of nostalgia, although I do have a fond memory of those old days, but out of a belief that what we lost was worth reclaiming. I wanted to make a place where people could be weird, and true, and unpolished. A place that didn’t punish imperfection or reward performance.
For years, I worked with Matt Gering trying to build something that could “compete.” We thought if we just added the right features, polished the right edges, and followed the right growth hacks, we could make something people loved. But over time, we realized we were playing someone else’s game. Competing with teams of thousands, optimizing for metrics we didn’t even care about. Eventually, Matt gave me the green light to try something different. Not to win but to create something we wanted to use.
What we wanted wasn’t revolutionary. In fact, it was simple. We wanted a space where we could share without broadcasting. Where expression wasn’t optimized for likes. Where people didn’t have to brand themselves to exist. We didn’t want another platform for creators to hustle. We wanted a space for humans to be.
That’s the strange truth about Lavish Made it’s not built on ambition, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s built on longing. A longing for the internet we remember. The one that felt like discovery. The one where your friend’s weird blog meant more than the celebrity’s sponsored post. The one where you could be a version of yourself without optimizing for engagement.
There’s a cultural cost to our current digital environment. We don’t talk about it much, perhaps because we’ve grown numb to it. But it’s there. In the hesitation to share something that feels too earnest. In the way we censor ourselves not out of fear, but out of fatigue. In the strange emptiness that follows a viral post. Lavish Made is an experiment in reversing that entropy.
When I think about what it means to create a platform today, I try to resist the gravitational pull of scale. Growth isn’t always good. Sometimes it’s just a faster way to lose the plot. The goal with Lavish Made was never to dominate a market or extract attention. The goal was to make something small enough to matter.
And yet, there is value in community real community. Not in the sense of branded hashtags or monetized influence, but in the sense of shared spaces. A digital room you actually want to be in. A place where someone’s vulnerability is met with care, not commodified.
There’s something countercultural about that now. Which is strange, given that social media was once supposed to be about connection. But here we are. And the people I built this for the friends I grew up with, the weird kids who made zines and mixtapes and coded their own forums deserve a place that remembers them.
So I stopped asking what features would drive retention and started asking: what kind of internet do I want my kids to grow up with? What kind of platform would I still want to be on ten years from now? Not because it’s addicting, but because it feels like home.
I don’t know if Lavish Made will be a success in the way venture capital defines it. I don’t know if it will scale. But I know that every line of code, every design decision, every quiet little feature was built with intention. Not to perform, but to connect. Not to game attention, but to honor it.
There’s a freedom in building something that doesn’t need to win. It allows you to prioritize meaning over metrics. To embrace quiet over clout. To return, in some small way, to the web that once thrilled us with its possibility.
That’s why Lavish Made exists. It’s not a product pitch. It’s not a business model in disguise. It’s a question, extended into the world: What if we made a place that felt like the old internet—not because we were stuck in the past, but because we still believed in what it stood for?
A slower, stranger, truer internet. Where being yourself was enough. Where friendship didn’t require branding. Where you could be known, not followed.
Lavish Made is not a revolution. It’s a reminder.
A quiet one. But sometimes, the quietest signals are the ones most worth hearing.
I was reading Slow Productivity by Cal Newport at the time a book that challenges the manic pace we’ve all come to normalize. It wasn’t a eureka moment, but a loosening. The book helped me reflect on the last ten years of building, tinkering, and, frankly, failing. Not because the ideas were bad. Not because the execution was flawed. But because the thing I was chasing wasn’t real. I wasn’t trying to build something for me. I was trying to reverse engineer what I thought people wanted based on what already existed. The irony, of course, is that the things that already existed were the problem.
At some point, you realize that trying to replicate the thing you quietly despise is a special kind of madness. And yet, so many of us do it. We look at the success of Instagram, or Twitter, or TikTok, and assume their dominance proves their rightness. But scale is not virtue. And virality is not meaning. The mere fact that something is addictive does not make it good for us.
What I came to see was that the social media experience most of us had grown up with particularly those of us old enough to remember the wild, exploratory weirdness of early internet communities had been slowly replaced by a system that disincentivized vulnerability, discouraged originality, and replaced curiosity with conformity. Platforms that once invited us to express ourselves had become machines that extracted us for a few dollars.
Lavish Made is, in some sense, a refusal. It is a rejection of the idea that social connection must come bundled with metrics, manipulation, and monetization. It’s an attempt to recreate something we lost not purely out of nostalgia, although I do have a fond memory of those old days, but out of a belief that what we lost was worth reclaiming. I wanted to make a place where people could be weird, and true, and unpolished. A place that didn’t punish imperfection or reward performance.
For years, I worked with Matt Gering trying to build something that could “compete.” We thought if we just added the right features, polished the right edges, and followed the right growth hacks, we could make something people loved. But over time, we realized we were playing someone else’s game. Competing with teams of thousands, optimizing for metrics we didn’t even care about. Eventually, Matt gave me the green light to try something different. Not to win but to create something we wanted to use.
What we wanted wasn’t revolutionary. In fact, it was simple. We wanted a space where we could share without broadcasting. Where expression wasn’t optimized for likes. Where people didn’t have to brand themselves to exist. We didn’t want another platform for creators to hustle. We wanted a space for humans to be.
That’s the strange truth about Lavish Made it’s not built on ambition, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s built on longing. A longing for the internet we remember. The one that felt like discovery. The one where your friend’s weird blog meant more than the celebrity’s sponsored post. The one where you could be a version of yourself without optimizing for engagement.
There’s a cultural cost to our current digital environment. We don’t talk about it much, perhaps because we’ve grown numb to it. But it’s there. In the hesitation to share something that feels too earnest. In the way we censor ourselves not out of fear, but out of fatigue. In the strange emptiness that follows a viral post. Lavish Made is an experiment in reversing that entropy.
When I think about what it means to create a platform today, I try to resist the gravitational pull of scale. Growth isn’t always good. Sometimes it’s just a faster way to lose the plot. The goal with Lavish Made was never to dominate a market or extract attention. The goal was to make something small enough to matter.
And yet, there is value in community real community. Not in the sense of branded hashtags or monetized influence, but in the sense of shared spaces. A digital room you actually want to be in. A place where someone’s vulnerability is met with care, not commodified.
There’s something countercultural about that now. Which is strange, given that social media was once supposed to be about connection. But here we are. And the people I built this for the friends I grew up with, the weird kids who made zines and mixtapes and coded their own forums deserve a place that remembers them.
So I stopped asking what features would drive retention and started asking: what kind of internet do I want my kids to grow up with? What kind of platform would I still want to be on ten years from now? Not because it’s addicting, but because it feels like home.
I don’t know if Lavish Made will be a success in the way venture capital defines it. I don’t know if it will scale. But I know that every line of code, every design decision, every quiet little feature was built with intention. Not to perform, but to connect. Not to game attention, but to honor it.
There’s a freedom in building something that doesn’t need to win. It allows you to prioritize meaning over metrics. To embrace quiet over clout. To return, in some small way, to the web that once thrilled us with its possibility.
That’s why Lavish Made exists. It’s not a product pitch. It’s not a business model in disguise. It’s a question, extended into the world: What if we made a place that felt like the old internet—not because we were stuck in the past, but because we still believed in what it stood for?
A slower, stranger, truer internet. Where being yourself was enough. Where friendship didn’t require branding. Where you could be known, not followed.
Lavish Made is not a revolution. It’s a reminder.
A quiet one. But sometimes, the quietest signals are the ones most worth hearing.
