#054 ✰ Two years of crafting Objet
Retrospective.
Hey there 👋 I’m Mathilde. We are Objet. We explore the intersection of consumerism, myth, satisfaction, desire, joy and pride. Not specifically in that order. To brag at your next dinner, Objet is the french word for 'object' and should be pronounced 'OB-JEH'.
If you’re new here, welcome !
Yesterday, I lost the content of this newsletter. All of it. I had just told Kev and Max I was pretty inspired. Bon ben voilà. (= Duuuuh. Noooo. F***.)
Here’s what we’re gonna talk about today: a quick retrospective of our time crafting Objet, empowering humans to feel satisfied.
The data: from an excel sheet (our first hypothesis and experiment)
The story: to a superpower
Cool reads, cause it’s always cool to read cool stuff
Objet
Ever felt like regretting a purchase on a regular basis? Haha I knew it.
Regretful purchases have a compounding effect on our confidence and our overall well-being. We are building Objet to cure this pain.
Once upon a time…
We started building Objet for ourselves, let’s be honest. We were so sick of repeated mistakes, of being fooled by other people’s desires or interests. Felt like constant noise.
And since our years working together were stretched by a geographical constraint (moving every year or so), there was practicality to it, too.
The data
During one summer, way before we were keen to share our app publicly, we documented every single object we had. I had 731. Max, 348. Kev, 871. A pretty tedious work as you can imagine. We thought that that would be it. List them all, and bam! We’d feel better.
So yes, we downsized our possessions. We took hundreds of insignificant and tough decisions ; “should it stay or should it go” kinda questions. Regretted some. Stood by most. The data was there. We now knew what we had. And this repeated exercise certainly sharpened our confidence on what we wanted our surroundings to look like. Junk was out, basically. How great this felt. Wooooot! Let’s have other people benefit from it! #preacherhat
50ish calls.
Turns out listing all our possessions was also a pretty stressful exercise, which wasn’t really the point (!). Two main reasons we identified.
- First, to make sure you ain’t forgetting anything in the process, you must be damn organized and have a LOT of time ahead. Set aside if you’re a large family with 5 kids living in a house - we had one, very determined during the pandemic.
- Second, like any inventory, its value lies in being up to date. If you’ve done the hard work of listing every object but are not keeping up with what comes in and out, well, it quickly becomes obsolete. And that sucks.
To solve problem one, we came up with facilitators, such as adding items in batch ; an email to forward your confirmation emails from Amazon that would read and log in your objects ; or else a ISBN scan that would import all available information on a specific book.
50ish calls.
To solve problem two, we came up with routines, such as a daily notification to log in your recent purchases, offering you a calendar view month over month.
50ish calls.
Minimalists and quantified-self people were starting to show interest in the product. But tracking for the sake of tracking did not feel quite right. Something was missing from the picture. Being satisfied isn’t just about buying rationally less but also feeling emotionally connected.
The story
Sapiens respond to stories. Money, borders, or our need for the latest AirPods Pro are made-up stories. We breathe and live stories. Maybe we should embrace our conditions and start cherishing our own, unique stories rather than chasing the standardized, interest-served ones?
Hence another angle. Cataloging your most significant objects alongside their stories:
The voice of your friend when she’s offering you that psychedelic illustration for your birthday ; your own words on that book you just finished and want to remember ; the voice of your mom sharing an ancestral story on a sacred object you inherited ; your own notes to record a -still vivid- memory of this board game from Turkey.
So that you will recall. And connect with others, maybe.
We aren’t building yet another social app. We want to give you the tools to make better purchasing decisions. Feel satisfied. Kind of a superpower, nothing less 😎
When we hear users say:
“And now I wonder. Will I log it in Objet? If not, I ain’t buying.”
we know we’re onto something big. So big that most people are ignoring us today. It is ok.
Max, Kev, myself and a bunch of early users (who will recognize themselves 🙃) have changed the way they buy ; we have learnt to control our impulses ; we are at peace with what we don’t and (probably) won’t have.
Trust our process. Onboard with Objet.
We deserve better than craving around acting like a desperate walking wallet.
Cool reads.
📰 Just discovered what 'Mudlarking' is 👉 "the process of digging around the foreshore of the River Thames".
"When he's restoring these objects, he muses about the original owners' lives and looks for clues about what they were like."
Imagine for a second if our ancestors used Objet to document their possessions 🌟
*****
📰 Black Friday 2022. There might still be some work to do here! This year, 50% of sales were mobile purchases, since "they’re with friends and family, and not at their desks! — and they are not in stores."
*****
📰 The idea of 'free will' is so inherent to what we're doing here with Objet; that it was interesting to see how it was approached here. The conclusion being:
There is some n such that you don't control your nth-order desires.
*****
📰 On another topic - success - but still, when you read the intro through a 'self-agency / free will' angle, it's quite related. This whole piece is a must-read.
When it comes to this word [success], this weighty topic- we have been instilled to ask by default only ‘How do I become successful?’ but not ‘What is success?’ and certainly not ‘Why should I bother pursuing success?’ or even ‘Is it in my interest to pursue success as it is presented to me?’
*****
📹 Seeking happiness? Go ahead.
Til next time,
Mathilde