What Teed Will Never Build
Feeds. Trending. Streak counters. View counts. Here's our permanent no-build list — and why every constraint makes the product better.
Most product roadmaps are lists of things to add. This is a list of things we will never add. Not "not right now." Not "maybe in v3." Never.
These aren't temporary constraints. They're permanent ones. And we think permanent constraints are what separate products with a point of view from products that just accumulate features until they become everything and nothing.
Here's the list.
A feed
No main feed. No "discover" feed. No "for you" feed. Feeds are attention traps disguised as content delivery. They create an infinite surface that you scroll until you either find something or give up. Usually both, in that order.
Teed's homepage isn't a feed. Your profile isn't a feed. Bags aren't arranged in a feed. If you want to find something, you go looking for it. If someone wants to share something with you, they send you a link. That's how the good parts of the internet used to work.
Trending sections
"Trending" is a popularity contest that rewards volume over quality. It tells you what everyone else is looking at, which is useful if you want to be like everyone else. We assume you don't.
Trending also creates a brutal feedback loop: popular things get shown more, which makes them more popular, which gets them shown more. The rich get richer. New creators with great taste get ignored because they haven't hit critical mass. This is the opposite of what curation should reward.
Engagement notifications
No "someone viewed your bag." No "your bag was shared 5 times." No little red dot pulling you back to check a number. Engagement notifications exist for one reason: to make you open the app. They dress up surveillance as social interaction. We're not doing it.
View counts (shown to creators)
We may track views internally for basic infrastructure reasons. We will never show them to you. The moment you see a view count, your relationship with your own creation changes. You start optimizing for the number. You feel bad when it's low. You chase the high when it's high. The collection stops being yours and starts being a performance.
Streak counters
Streaks are behaviorist conditioning applied to creative work. Duolingo uses them for language learning. Snapchat uses them for messaging. They work by making you afraid of losing your streak, not by making you want to do the thing. Fear is not a good foundation for building something you're proud of.
Follower count emphasis
Profiles on Teed don't prominently display follower counts. We're not building a status game. Your bags speak for themselves. A person with 12 followers who curates a perfect bag of home espresso equipment is more valuable to Teed than an influencer with 50,000 followers and a bag full of sponsored products.
Infinite scroll
Every page on Teed has edges. Bags have edges — that's part of the definition. A bag is finite by design, because curation means choosing what to leave out. The platform itself should reflect that same discipline. Pages end. You reach the bottom. Done.
Auto-playing content
Nothing on Teed will ever move, play, or animate without your explicit action. Autoplay is the design equivalent of someone grabbing your arm to show you something. We keep our hands to ourselves.
Urgency language
No "limited time." No "don't miss out." No "act now." No countdown timers. No "only 3 left." Urgency language is a sales tactic, and Teed isn't selling anything. We're holding things for you. They'll be there tomorrow.
Activity dashboards
No "your weekly stats." No "here's how your bags performed." Dashboards turn creative work into a game with a score, and once there's a score, you play for the score instead of playing for the work. We'd rather you spend ten minutes making a bag better than ten minutes analyzing how a bag performed.
Comparison features
No "your bag vs. similar bags." No "see how other people organized their gear." Comparison is useful in some contexts. On a curation platform, it turns personal taste into a competition. Your bag is yours. It doesn't need to be benchmarked against anyone else's.
Growth prompts
No "invite friends to grow your audience." No "share your bag to get more views." No gamified onboarding that teaches you to optimize for reach. You're not here to grow an audience. You're here to build a collection. If people find it, great. If they don't, the collection is still yours and still good.
Re-engagement emails
No "we miss you" emails. No "you haven't logged in for 2 weeks." No guilt-driven campaigns to drag you back. If you don't want to use Teed for six months, your bags will be exactly where you left them when you come back. We'll be here. No guilt. No nagging.
Why constraints matter
Every feature on this list would increase engagement. We know that. Notifications would bring people back. Feeds would increase time on site. Trending would drive discovery metrics. Streak counters would boost daily active users.
We don't care.
Not every metric that goes up means the product got better. Sometimes a metric goes up because you made the product more addictive, which is different from making it more useful. We're optimizing for useful.
Products without constraints become shapeless. They accumulate every feature that moves a number, and eventually they all look the same — an infinite feed with notifications and trending and streaks and view counts. You've used that product. You're using it right now, probably on three different apps that have slowly converged into the same thing.
Teed is a curated collection of things you care about. That's it. And every item on this list is a wall we've built to keep it that way.
Constraints aren't limitations. They're architecture. They're what give the building its shape.
This list isn't a list of things we can't build. It's a list of things we've chosen not to build, permanently, so that the thing we are building stays coherent.
That's the whole bet.