The attention economy, and how to grab yours

People don't care about your product. There it is, that's the thing. They're not scrolling Instagram for SaaS products, they're not on TikTok to find out about the next big fintech tool, and they're definitely not on LinkedIn so their CRM woes can be solved in one fell swoop. They want to laugh, to roll their eyes at a shitpost and screenshot it for r/LinkedInLunatics, to have something to say on Slack that isn't what everyone else is saying.

If you're out there on social media posting about product benefits, quite simply, you're wasting your time. Nobody cares, and this isn't cynicism - it's the actual math and the psychology of the feed. That math has a name: the attention economy is the competition for a finite supply of human attention, where every post is up against every other post for the same sliver of a second.

Look at your customer's attention span. The widely cited Microsoft number puts the average human attention span at eight seconds. Scientists have picked that finding apart since it was published, and some of them are right to, but sit on a bus for five minutes and watch a real thumb on a real phone and the debate dies.

And the platforms aren't on your side. TikTok, Instagram, Reels, LinkedIn, X, every major feed is optimized for one thing: keep the user on the app. The algorithm doesn't 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, so they can serve more ads. If it did, you get surfaced to more people. If it didn't, you get buried, no matter how polished the post was or how much budget sat behind it. You're not competing with your category. You're competing with memes and puppies and storytimes.

So here's the uncomfortable reframe. You're not a marketer trying to reach buyers; you're a performer auditioning for the algorithm's attention on behalf of your buyers. Because they don't turn off their attention the moment their 9-5 ends. The product isn't the act. 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.

A hook. Not a headline, a hook. The first line has to make the thumb hesitate. "I built a SaaS product and nobody cared" makes the thumb hesitate. "Top 5 CRM tips for founders" does not. A hook is any opening that forces the reader into the next sentence, and it's the single highest-leverage piece of writing in the entire post.

A polarizing statement. Something roughly half your audience will disagree with, loudly. "SEO is a lottery most founders will lose" is polarizing. "SEO is important for growth" isn't. Polarization isn't picking a fight; it's 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 can't see and can't stop - Slack, Discord, Reddit. But recognition works too, the "oh god this is me" feeling. So does indignation. So does relief. What doesn't work is neutral, and absolutely not corporate. Either of those 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 can't 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.

And here's the part that usually gets lost. The post isn't the point. 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. The order matters. 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. (You probably scrolled past one in the time it took to read that sentence.)

This is one of the twenty-two commercial levers, and it's a lever in the exact sense of the word - you keep your hand on it. It doesn't go to a content agency. It doesn't get outsourced to a junior who's never met the buyer. The person who understands the product and the person buying it writes the post that earns the two seconds, because nobody else can. Founders tend to recoil at this because it sounds like begging for attention, but it isn't. It's the cost of being in the room at all. The room just happens to be a feed that moves at the speed of a quickly-scrolling thumb.

The sale is on the other side of the scroll.