68% of Your Users Hate You: The “Offline” Opportunity

We’re on the verge of a new roll.

We’ve reached the “Peak Screen” and what comes next is a downhill tumble.

Just as smart money shorted the housing market in 2008, the smart money of 2025 is shorting the attention economy.

In issue #88, in the piece “Stop Building Dopamine Slot Machines: The Attention Recovery Economy Is Next” we explored this shift from a different lens.

This time, we’ll talk about a different trend, one where the goal may no longer be keeping users on the platform, but helping them detach from it.

I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life glueing your eyes to a screen.

Between my 50+ apps, the growth hacks I teach in The Product Growth Playbook, and the subscription models I helped pioneer at Madduck, my entire career has been built on one metric: Retention. I wanted you scrolling, tapping, and swiping until your thumbs bled.

But something shifted recently. I was looking at the data —and if you know me, you know I live in the data— and I saw a terrifying (and profitable) trend. The users aren’t just tired; they are revolting.

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The “Digital Hangover” is Real

Let’s look at the numbers, because feelings don’t pay the bills.

A recent survey by the British Standards Institution dropped a bombshell: 68% of teens feel worse after spending time on social media.

Even crazier? 47% say they would delete their accounts entirely if they could.

We are looking at a market where nearly half of the customer base is actively looking for an exit strategy. Search volume for “digital detox” tripled in 2024. The “Digital Detox App” market alone is projected to hit $2.5 billion by 2034.

People are desperate to touch grass, but they’ve forgotten how to do it without a push notification.