What’s in the article-

- Why is this happening?

- What are the long term effects?

- Is there a fix?

- My personal attempts to avoid brainrot.

(Note- I don’t use ChatGpt or any AI tool to write).

You know it, I know it, everyone knows it — short form content is killing people’s ability to study anything in depth. Post school/college or even while people are into academics, their ability to take cognitive load or their ability to maintain a flow state of deep uninterrupted work/study has become a battle of sorts.

Why is this happening?

Human attention span has come down from 12 seconds to 8 seconds; that’s less than a goldfish’s (9 seconds) attention span, by the way. How did all of this happen within a decade? TikTok? Maybe.

The invention of short-form scrollable content — easily accessible and unlimited in quantity — is so rampant in today’s age that it’s super easy for people to fall into the never-ending well of feel-good content, which gives them short-term dopamine spikes. These apps/platforms have always battled for attention but never like this before. Creators are applying every science, tactic, and psychological trick in making their first 8-second hook so compelling that people end up watching their reel/TikTok till the end.

In recent cases, the situation has gotten so bad that people are taking desperate measures to grab attention, doing things that would once have been scorned. Today, there is no right or wrong — everything is a game of attention, and people are willing to go to any height to grab it. Data used to be the new oil, but today it is attention, by margins.

The core remains the same through the ages, despite the medium changing: sell the audience something. Monetize your reach.

What are the long-term effects?

Studies done on the human psyche in the TikTok/Reels era reveal that the human brain is taking incomprehensible damage when it comes to focusing on literally anything. People chronically addicted to short-form content struggle to watch a 12-minute YouTube video or a full-length movie.

People are increasingly incapable of investing time for a better or deeper reward (whether knowledge, entertainment, or skill-building). When they can laugh continuously by watching more than 300 reels, why would they watch a two-hour comedy movie? The trade-off has become a mountain too steep for most screen addicts to climb.

Most of these chronically online reel/TikTok addicts fail to remember the reel they watched three scrolls above and how it ended. Memory retention is nearly zero due to content overload.

The damages are innumerable and alarming: weaker long-term memory formation, dopamine desensitization, surface-level learning, increased anxiety and restlessness, insecurity, comparison, sleep disruption, moodiness, and so on.

I fear this will get so bad that the biggest reason behind the new generation’s unemployability will be short-form content addiction.

We can already see multitudes of examples wherein kids go diabolical once they lose access to their phones. There have even been cases of violence when their phones were taken away. Suicidal tendencies increase manifold due to short-form content addiction too. It’s a net negative for most users. The results will be clearer in 10–20 years.

Is there a fix?

Like all other addictions, the fix for short-form content also comes from within or can be enforced externally. We haven’t yet reached the stage where rehab centres for such people exist — but if they open in the future, I won’t be surprised.

If you are reading this article and are self-aware enough to recognize that you or someone you love may be addicted and needs help, here are a few things you can try:

• Sit down and introspect: How much time are you spending online uselessly? Screen-time tracking is readily available; check it and you might be shocked. Ask yourself if this is the right use of your precious time.

• Remind yourself of your ambition: Do you want to start a startup, get into Harvard, or become a national sports player? None of this will happen without obsession and sacrifice. At the top, discipline is the difference-maker. Ronaldo’s blueprint is transparent, but most people lack the discipline to follow it. You don’t need to be Ronaldo-level obsessed if you don’t want to be the best — but even to stand out and make a good life, it takes effort.

• Have an accountability partner: A sibling, partner, or friend close to your age can help. Enable, motivate, and keep each other on track. Shared goals are often achieved more easily.

• Plan deliberately: Spend 10 minutes every day mapping out short-term goals, long-term goals, what to avoid, and what to run from — and apply it consciously.

• Use screen-time warning apps: Let them nudge you when you cross more than 10 minutes on social media. A small interruption can go a long way.

There are countless ways to fight this addiction, but the greatest and most effective remains sheer willpower. Mastering that benefits you to fight from any kind of indiscipline that might creep in, in your life.

My personal methods to avoid brainrot-

I too, like many of you have been struggling with brainrot and doomscrolling despite being aware of its consequences. My fight with brainrot is an ongoing effort but here are a few things I’m trying and will be trying in the future to avoid brainrot-

• Avoid screens in the first 1–2 hours of your day and last 2 hours before sleeping. Keep your phone away from your reach during bedtime.

• Use DnD services as much as possible. While working, working out and any other activity whee the screen isn’t required.

• Keep internet off in your phone as much as possible. The notifications popping really hurt your effort to quit screen-time.

• Disable push notifications for social apps if possible. Most of our lives don’t depend on social media so this can actually be done.

• Decide time intervals and limits in which you want to use and engage with such apps and STICK to it.

• Even if you are consuming short-form content try resetting your account or create a new account and follow net-positive content creators in your professional field. Atleast, you’ll end up getting motivated or learn something new.

• Have an accountability partner with whom you can share screen-time reports daily/weekly and you both can keep each other in check.

• Write your thoughts down, pick writing as a hobby, write about whatever you like either publicly or privately. Reading and writing requires effort of your brain thinking and rewires it significantly.

• Rewire your brain with long-form content. Switch to reading good books. The time you put in reels/tiktoks will now start going into consuming better knowledge. Reading>>>>anything.

Well these are good to begin with I believe. You’ll falter every now and then but little progress everyday will go a long way.

I hope this article was able to provoke some thought and help you take a better resolve for yourself and for your loved ones.

Hi folks,

We now have over 1500 users on Medial from across 10+ cities in India! Time to introduce you to some new features! As you continue reading daily updates in the startup ecosystem of India, it is critical to know and test your knowledge around stakeholders of the industry if you are a true enthusiast!

Introducing Quiz And Polls on MEDIAL!

QUIZ-

The idea is to give you more info and titbits of the startup world, vocab and a little bit of education in a fun and more intriguing way.

POLLS-

Now you can actually see what peers around you think about work-related topics and get a hunch of the market sentiment.

How do you get to participate in a Quiz/Poll on Medial? There’s no way to only play these. After every 10 news pieces, you will be able to see a quiz or poll to play in. So keep scrolling and have fun while being updated with the latest in the startup world.

Next update (1.1.4)-

For the next release, we are working on these features-

New onboarding screen- We know we were using a very basic login screen but the next one will be super cool, we promise!

Dark mode on the app- Fan of using dark mode in every app you use? Worry not! Medial is introducing dark mode in the coming release!

News Feed Design update- No more cards and ancient designs! Experience a premium feed for consuming your favourite startup news from the next release onwards!

User search- We heard you! A lot of you wanted to connect with other folks on the platform, network and work together. You will be able to search for other users on the platform with the next release onwards!

Update on iOS- Almost there! We should launch our iOS app sometime in October and also with it comes the actual social media part of Medial. Our user generated content feed! Brace yourselves :)

If you have any ideas/suggestion please email us at contact@medial.app and we will 100% work on those if there’s general consensus. Email us even if you are facing any issues while using the app so that we can fix them!

Thank you!

-Team Medial.

Web- Here

Twitter- Here

Google Playstore Link- Download Here

Today I will talk about how you can program your time to build a startup in college while pursuing your education. I have done this so I believe I have some foresight on what it takes and how you can navigate through the challenges of starting up as a student entrepreneur.

But before that a bit of background. I am Niket, 25 years old, based out of Bangalore India. I built a tech-enabled self-publishing startup when I was in my second year of college at the age of 18 and then ended up raising some capital, scaling the business and eventually sold it to India’s largest digital literature and IP ecosystem startup- Pratilipi. I spent two years scaling the venture post-acquisition and then moved on to create Medial which is the next-gen professional social media platform. More on that later.

Back to the topic of starting as a student entrepreneur, here’s my take on how to effectively manage the entire journey, what to do and what not to do. I am covering four major questions in this blog.

The first and major question I get from students in college is -

• “How do I get investment to start testing my idea and building my startup?”

You don’t need money to test your idea. For most tech and even ops businesses, you can test and find PMF organically without investing a lot of money. There’s this absurd idea in most people’s minds that if someone gives them enough money then they could build something amazing. And even I thought so at some point in time- that money can solve a lot of problems. But you see, the world isn’t a fairytale and it’s not so easy. No one would trust you or give you their money without you having any significant track record. Sure, if you have already built a great venture and proved yourself, next time you might get pre-seed capital based on your previous “pedigree (track record of doing something worthwhile, proof of you creating value previously)”. But if you are a student entrepreneur, chances are that this is your first time and it’s not going to happen easily. Anyway, in most tech/product businesses that are purely on the internet, you should assemble a bunch of great coders you know and sell the idea to them, ask them to probably be your co-founder so that they feel excited and incentivised about building your app. Then reach out to folks in college or around in your circle who can probably be your first beta users and see if people actually like the app and are coming back to it. It’s very easy to test this without much monetary resources. Be hacky, street-smart and get shit done instead of waiting for some golden angel who will come and give you money. And even if you do require a small amount of money, you and your co-founders can pool it in, ask your parents and heck, work for a paid project for a few months, save the money and then start. If you have enough hunger and determination you will find your way. If you are stubborn enough and don’t give up and start building, you will see how things fall into place, how people become interested in your startup and how the doors start opening for you. If you have to want it bad enough. In a tech venture, your costly part probably might be AWS/Cloud costs. AWS and Google Cloud give free credits to start with in amounts which is usually more than enough to deploy and test your app/product for a few months and to see traction. And if your traction blows up, you can either head towards profitability if you want to bootstrap or you can in most cases find an initial angel investor or pre-seed capital from a VC (Venture Capital firm). In India, communities like Razorpay Rize provide $5000 in AWS and Google Cloud credits for free in their program. That’s how we ran Medial initially. Our major cloud costs were shared by the amazing community at Razorpay Rize. You can check them out HERE. The next big question for student entrepreneurs is-

• “How do you know which idea to work on?”

Now this is a tricky question with no straight answer. Some founders are visionary but no one is perfect. Even a great idea needs testing and PMF (product market fit) finding. Some founders are sheer machines who keep testing the waters until they find a sign of light at the end of the tunnel. Imagine that you have a SaaS (Software as a service) startup Idea. So you created your tool. Now find 5 companies that might use it, chase someone inside who is relevant to your tools domain in the company and demo it to them. Explain to them how they can use your tool and improve something for their use case. Chances are 1 out of 5 or 1 out of 50 will say yes. Once you have 1 then you can tell others how that client of theirs saw improvements and sell to others. If the tool is actually solving anything, people will not hesitate to try it out or pay for it. That’s your PMF. Then you need to find more and more clients and start building your revenue pipeline. For a social app, you can bring some users organically or through paid ads and see if they are doing what you expected them to do on the app, talk to your users about what features they’d like, how their experience is and keep building on the feedback. For a physical product, you just need 5-10 customers to test the waters. You can even give it at discounts initially to test if they actually like the product and if they do, they’ll probably buy again or recommend it to their peers. For an ed-tech/course product, it follows the same pattern. If the reviews are good and your course is appreciated then you need to sell and gather reviews and keep hustling. The problem is that you need to be honest with yourself and not fall too much in love with your idea/product. If something doesn’t work, move on. You don’t need to register a company and get a trademark before starting your journey. test and move on ASAP. Don’t spend too much time on useless things. Your chief objective is to find that winning idea. And 1 out of 10 ideas tested might just be it. How fast you execute and how honest you are with yourself is what will get you closer to your final idea to which you can dedicate the next 3-10 years of your life. So don’t settle and move fast with your execution until you find your “aha/voila” moment/product.

• “How do you manage studies along with your startup"?”

If you want to build a startup, you need to be ready to be really good at “time management”. I wouldn’t recommend dropping out or not caring about your grades. They are important contrary to popular beliefs in the ecosystem. Yes, your degree per se might not matter a lot but the process, the journey, the friendships and learnings while acquiring that degree are invaluable. You will have to put in more time. Sleep for 7 hours, study and attend classes and find 3-4 hours to spend on your startup. Then you have the weekends when you can spend more time. Honestly, engineering colleges in India are the best space to startup because students study seriously anyway in the last week (some even just the night before) the exams. And it doesn’t matter which degree you are pursuing, you can definitely find enough time to build your MVP. All your answers lie within yourself. Work to find it.

• “Should I bootstrap or raise funding?”

Honestly, venture funding is only for startups that have the potential of enough scale. We can talk about Funding vs. Bootstrapping in another blog but for today, bootstrap until you have proven initial metrics/traction, then keep bootstrapping as much as you can, the more you grow without external capital, the better it gets when you finally raise. And if you think your startup absolutely needs funding to operate and reach a point of scale after which you can monetise then go for it earlier. Remember funding can give you a breather but isn’t a sign of success. It is just a means to accelerate or get bigger. If your basics aren’t sorted whatever money you have raised will slip away quickly. It’s a myth that funding = success.

On a final note- Keep working hard, be honest with yourself and keep moving somewhere. Being stagnant is what kills most entrepreneurs. I have come across many students who want to do their own startup but never start anything and keep saying if they had funding they could build the next big thing. The best day to start was yesterday and the next best day is today. If you have more questions as a student entrepreneur or if you have a suggestion on what I should write next, please let me know below in the comments. Share this blog with your fellow entrepreneurs. I will write about my journey of building “The Write Order” in college in detail in another blog and also about what’s going on with my new startup “Medial” in another blog. You can install Medial on your Android phone through this LINK. iOS app is coming soon.

Our website- https://medial.app

Our Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/medial.app/

Our LinekdIN- https://www.linkedin.com/company/medial_app/

Our Twitter- https://twitter.com/medialapp

Our android app link - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.medial.android

iOS app is coming soon.

(To connect with me directly email me at- niket@medial.app)

Cheers,

Niket.

Hi there. I am writing this article to give an insight on our thoughts and brains on why we decided to create another social media platform when the world is cluttered with so many of them already. Inherently there are two thoughts that drove our team to start building Medial. 

One, that the “social” element in “professional social media” space is absent. 

Most of the content you see on “feed” of platforms which are at scale are very redundant or snobby, boastful, plain updates, or template for people trying to be influencers or clickbaity posts like “Here are three things I wished I knew when for being a pro at my workplace”. You get it. It’s not something which provides value but well hey! It gets you engagement and followers maybe so why not. The lack of focus on technical/knowledge based content on these feeds has really defeated the entire purpose of the “professional” part of these social media platforms along with the “social” part which is absolutely corrupted. Just like Instagram should have pictures and stories, Youtube should have great videos on literally any topic, Medial will have relevant and non-clickbaity/influencer content on its feed. Something that matters. Something that helps you in some way or provides some value. We believe that users are not going to report dumb content or put any effort into manually setting up their feed in a certain way. The recommendation algorithm has to be smart enough to make sense to a certain kind of user. 

Two, we have too many websites/platforms which actually should be together.

Medial is solving for attention. Nobody would be willing to use 6 different websites and create their accounts everywhere, trading their personal data to just get information for the same purpose. So many platforms started springing up to pick up a certain use-case which was lacking in the bigger platforms to create vertical solutions and some of them did a great job. Problem being that if a horizontal platform had these mini features properly integrated then it’d increase its value plus make the vertical solutions redundant.

We are taking multiple problems into consideration. It’s hard to solve everything but our GTM has been thoroughly thought through. The way we will introduce every feature, every page will be in a way which will be easy to grasp. Feed will be curated for exactly what you’d want. Jobs and applying for them will solve the existing pain points for both the applicants and for HR’s. Targeting and recommendation will be accurate to its bones. Exclusive content creation will be highly valued on the app. In crux, anything we will do will have some purpose and will be different from what you see on today’s platforms. These things will be exactly what was missing and causing inconvenience to you. Some of us might not realise these problems entirely but once you see it, you might just be convinced. Decluttering is an art. Medial will be full of it.

Creating an ecosystem of its own takes mammoth effort and we understand it. Maybe we are foolish enough to dream of building a social media platform out of India which can take over the world. The fight will be long. We understand that. But if our hypothesis is correct then in the next five years, you’ll feel our shockwaves across the internet and in the next 10 years we might just become the preferred platform for most companies and individuals as their go-to social media platform for professional networking, jobs, information which is accurate and personalised and more. 

We will be launching a public beta in late August 2023. iOS app shall be live by Sep/Oct 2023. Medial is being built by Niket Raj Dwivedi, Aishwarya Raj Pandey, Harsh Dwivedi and Prateek Kaien from Bangalore as of 2023. 

Our website-

https://medial.app

Our Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/medial.app/

Our LinekdIN- https://www.linkedin.com/company/medial_app/

Our Twitter- https://twitter.com/medialapp

Cheers,

Team Medial.