The attention economy, and how to grab your portion

Nobody opened the app to hear about your SaaS product.

People don't care about your product. There it is - I said it. They're not scrolling Instagram for SaaS products, they're not hanging out on LinkedIn so their CRM woes can be solved in one fell swoop. They want to laugh. They want to roll their eyes at a shitpost and screenshot it for r/LinkedInLunatics. They want something to say at lunch that isn't what everyone else is saying. So if you're out there posting about product benefits, quite simply, you're wasting your time (sorry). Nobody cares - and that's maths, algorithms and psychology, not cynicism.

The widely-cited Microsoft number, reported by Time in 2015, puts the average human attention span at eight seconds (apparently it was 12 seconds in 2000). Scientists have picked that finding apart since it was published, and some of them are right to, but sit in a cafe or on a bus for five minutes and watch a real thumb on a real phone, and make your conclusion. Nobody is giving your post eight seconds.

Internal data from Meta, reported in the press over the last few years, puts the average dwell time on a single mobile feed item at under two seconds. Another 2021 report by eye square puts this at 2.5 seconds. Anecdotal observations put this closer to one second (source: me, and a career spent building content strategies). One second is your window - one second to beat a dog video, a friend's holiday photo, and whatever skibidi toilet actually is.

And the platforms are not on your side. TikTok, Instagram, Reels, LinkedIn, X: every major feed is optimized for one thing: keep the user on the app. The algorithm does not care whether your post sold a seat. It cares whether your post kept the scroll inside the four walls of the platform for another thirty seconds. If it did, you get surfaced to more people. If it didn't, you'll be buried, no matter how polished the post was or how much budget sat behind it. You're competing with everything - the dogs, the memes, all of it - not just your category.

So here's the point. You're a performer, auditioning for the algorithm's attention on behalf of your buyers - not a marketer trying to reach them directly. The product is the thing they find later, once the act has earned them the right to still be sitting there.

Here's what actually travels.

Looking for a shitpost, not a features and benefits post

A hook. Not a headline, a hook. The first line has to make the thumb hesitate, in less than one second. "I built a SaaS product and nobody cared" makes the thumb hesitate. "Top 5 tips for founders" does not. A hook is any opening that forces the reader into the next sentence, and it is the single highest-leverage thing you can do.

A polarizing statement. Something roughly half your audience will disagree with, loudly. "SEO is a lottery most founders cannot afford" is polarizing. "SEO is important for growth" is not. Polarization is not picking a fight. It is staking a position a reasonable human could, in principle, argue with. The algorithm reads argument as engagement, and engagement as a signal to promote. A post everyone nods politely at gets the same algorithmic treatment as a post nobody saw.

A strong emotional reaction. Laughter is the highest-value one because laughter gets screenshotted, and screenshots travel outside the platform into places the platform cannot see and cannot stop - Slack, Discord, Reddit. But recognition works too, the "oh god this is me" feeling. So does indignation. So does relief. What does not work is neutral, and absolutely not corporate. Either of these gets scrolled, and a scrolled post is the cost of being boring paid in lost reach.

Three things in one post, every post. Hook, position, feeling. If you cannot point to at least two of these - and hook better be one of them - after you hit publish, you already know how it's going to do.

The post is the price of entry. People who laugh at your shitpost on Monday read your product page on Thursday, because by then they've decided you're an interesting person, and interesting people are allowed to be selling something. Earn the scroll, then sell sideways. Most founders try to do it in the other order, which is why most founder posts read like a software manual trying to make small talk. But you probably won't know that, because you scrolled past it in 0.5 seconds.

And if I had to give any further advice on how to make good content? Keep your hands on it: don't hand it to a content agency, or outsource it to a junior who has never met the buyer. You, the person who understands the product and the person buying it, will be able to write the post that earns the attention, because nobody else can.

Founders tend to recoil at this because it sounds like begging for attention. It's the cost of being in the room. The room just happens to be a feed that moves at the speed of a quickly-scrolling thumb.

Stop posting about your product - start posting the thing your buyer would send to a friend. The sale is on the other side of the scroll.