The Joy Thesis

Jan 2, 2026

ProductPhilosophy

The Dogma

If you have spent more than a week in product management, you have heard the commandment: "You are not the user."

It is the first thing they teach you. It is the shield we use against bias. It is the logic that prevents an engineer from putting a command-line interface into a banking app. In B2B SaaS, this is gospel. If you are building payroll software for HR managers and you are not an HR manager, your intuition is worthless. You need interviews, surveys, and personas.

But in Consumer Social, Consumer Utility, and Consumer Content, this advice is not just wrong - it is lethal.

For consumer apps, the only valid thesis is that you must be the user. In fact, you must be the most demanding, annoying, heavy user of your own product.

The "Vibe" Cannot Be Researched

Consumer software does not solve a "problem" in the strict utilitarian sense.

  • Instagram did not solve the "problem" of image hosting. (Flickr existed).
  • TikTok did not solve the "problem" of short video. (Vine existed).
  • Linear did not solve the "problem" of issue tracking. (Jira existed).

These apps succeeded because of a feeling. A specific texture of interaction - the bounce of a scroll, the speed of a loader, the font weight on a header - that made the user feel cool, efficient, or delighted.

You cannot A/B test your way to a vibe. You cannot survey users to ask, "Would you prefer this animation to be 200ms or 300ms?" They don't know. But you know. If you use the app every day, you will feel the 100ms lag in your gut. If you rely on research, that lag is a "P3 Performance Issue." If you use the app, it is a "P0 annoyance that makes me want to throw my phone."

The Alarm Clock Parable

Consider the Alarm Clock.

If you followed standard User Research methodologies to build an alarm clock, you would interview 50 people.

  • User: "I sleep through my alarm."
  • PM: "Okay, we need a louder speaker."
  • User: "I hate setting it every night."
  • PM: "Okay, let's make it recurring."

You would build a loud, recurring, functional alarm clock. You would build the default iOS Clock app from 2010. It works. It is boring. It is a commodity.

Now, look at how the category was redefined by apps like Rise or Loóna or even the Sleep Cycle movement.

These founders didn't just want to wake up; they wanted to stop hating waking up. They built apps that wake you up with gentle gradients of light. They built apps that track your REM cycle to wake you at the optimal biological moment. They turned a utility (noise at 7 AM) into a ritual (waking up refreshed).

You cannot get there by asking users what they want. Users only know what they hate about the current solution. They cannot imagine the feeling of a better one. Only a founder who is obsessively dogfooding their own creation can say, "Technically this works, but it feels sharp. It needs to feel soft."

The "Micro-Friction" Filter

Consumer apps die by a thousand cuts. A login screen that takes 3 seconds too long. A notification that feels slightly spammy. A button that is hard to reach with one thumb.

These are micro-frictions.

  • In a B2B app, users tolerate friction because their boss pays them to use the software.
  • In a Consumer app, friction is an exit door.

If you do not enjoy your own app, you will never fix the micro-frictions. You will prioritize "features" over "feel" because features show up on a roadmap, but "feel" only shows up in usage metrics.

When you enjoy your app, you polish it not because it maximizes ROI, but because you have to look at it every day. You fix the ugly border radius because it bothers you. That selfishness is the only quality control that scales.

The Exclusionary Principle

The counter-argument is obvious: "What if I'm weird? What if I like things nobody else likes?"

This is the risk. If you build for yourself and you are a complete outlier, you will build a product for an audience of one.

But the alternative is worse. The alternative is building a product for an "average user" who doesn't exist. It is building a Frankenstein monster of features requested by a committee.

It is better to build a product that you love and hope there are 1,000,000 other people like you, than to build a product you are indifferent to, hoping to please everyone.

Conclusion

To build a great consumer app, you don't need a 50-page thesis on "Gen Z behavior patterns." You don't need a Gartner report.

You need to build something that you open on a Sunday morning, not because you are testing it, but because you want to. If you don't get that dopamine hit from your own creation, neither will anyone else.

The Only Thesis: Build what you want to exist. If you have taste, others will follow.