I spent fifteen years in advertising. Fifteen years trying to make people look at things. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the single hardest thing in the world right now isn't building a product, not writing code, not raising money. It's getting someone to stop scrolling. That is it. That's the whole game. Everything else is downstream of whether someone decides, in a fraction of a second, that what you've made is worth their time.
We're living through the greatest attention crisis in human history. Not because people have shorter attention spans - that's a lazy narrative. People will binge eight hours of television without blinking. They'll read a 5,000-word article about something they care about. Their attention span is fine. What has changed is the competition for that attention. The sheer volume of things demanding to be looked at has made every single one of us ruthlessly, almost unconsciously selective about what we give our time to.
And most brands, most products, most content - they're broke. Attention-broke. They're asking for something they've not earned. They're standing in the town square shouting into the void while everyone walks past with headphones on.
The thumb-stop economy
In advertising, we had a name for it. The thumb-stop moment. That fraction of a second where someone scrolling through their feed decides whether to keep going or pause. Everything - the brief, the concept, the craft, the media spend, all of it - comes down to that instant. Millions of pounds invested in a single moment of human decision-making that happens faster than conscious thought.
What I learned from years of obsessing over that moment is something that most product builders, most content creators, most founders seem to miss entirely. You can't fight for attention. You have to deserve it. There's no hack, no trick, no growth strategy that overcomes the fundamental problem of making something that isn't worth looking at. If the thing itself doesn't reward the attention it asks for, no amount of distribution will save it.
This is why design matters so much. Not design as decoration. Design as first impression. Design as the thing that signals, in that fraction of a second, whether what follows is worth someone's time. The internet has trained us all to be instant visual editors. We know, before we've read a single word, whether something was made with care. We can feel it. The spacing. The typography. The colour choices. The overall sense that someone gave a damn.
The economics of looking
Think of attention like actual currency. You wake up with a finite amount. Not unlimited - finite. Every notification, every headline, every thumbnail, every push alert is a transaction. Someone is asking you to spend some of your attention on them. And just like real money, people are protective of it. They don't spend it freely. They want a return on their investment.
This is where most things fail. They ask for attention without offering anything in return. An advert that interrupts without entertaining. A product that solves a problem nobody has. A piece of content that exists because someone had a content calendar to fill, not because they had something to say. These are attention debts - withdrawals from the collective goodwill of people's finite daily attention budget, with no deposit made in return.
The projects I've built that work - the ones that people come back to, share, and remember - are the ones that give more than they take. Modern Retro works because every single image is worth looking at. Not because of a clever marketing strategy, but because the images themselves reward attention. You stop scrolling because the image is interesting. You stay because there are eighty-six more. The attention is earned by the work, not demanded by the distribution.
Design is the first impression
I'm genuinely obsessed with the way things look. Not in a superficial way - in a strategic way. Because I know, from years of advertising, that the visual impression happens before the rational one. People see before they read. They feel before they think. If the design doesn't stop them, the words never get a chance.
This is why I spend what some people might consider an unreasonable amount of time on the visual layer of my projects. The typography on CultureTerminal. The card layouts on the portfolio. The image generation for Modern Retro. These aren't finishing touches applied at the end. They're the foundation that everything else is built on. Get the visual right and people will give you their attention. Get it wrong and nothing else matters.
The brands and publications I admire most understand this. Monocle doesn't need to look as good as it does. It's a news magazine. Bloomberg Businessweek doesn't need to look as good as it does. It's a business publication. But they know something that their competitors don't - that design isn't a nice-to-have, it's the competitive advantage. It's the thing that makes someone choose them over an equally functional alternative. It's the signal that says: we care about the details, and if we care about the details you can see, imagine how much we care about the details you can't.
What this means for building
Every time I start a new project, I ask myself one question before anything else: would I stop scrolling for this? Not would I use it. Not is there a market for it. Not can I build it. Would I, as a person browsing the internet with a hundred other tabs open and a thousand other things competing for my eyeballs, stop and look at this? If the answer is no, the project isn't ready.
This filter has killed more ideas than any technical limitation ever has. And the ideas that survive it tend to be the ones that actually work. Because they start from the right place. They start from the understanding that attention is the scarcest resource on the internet, and that anything you build is competing for it, whether you like it or not.
The best compliment anyone can give one of my products is "Wait, show me that again." Not "that's useful." Not "that's clever." But "show me that again." Because that means the work earned a second look. In a world of six thousand daily ads and eight-second attention windows, a second look is the highest form of praise.
Attention is currency. Most people are broke because they spend all their time asking for it and none of their time earning it. Build things that deserve to be looked at. Design them like someone's time matters - because it does. Make the thumb stop. Then make it worth stopping for.
That's the whole game. Everything else is noise.
