I'm building against the attention economy on purpose

Everyone building in 2026 is optimising for shorter. Faster. Simpler. Ten-second hooks. TikTok-length demos. One-click onboarding. If your product requires more than 30 seconds to understand, you're told you have a problem.

My co-founder and I are doing the opposite. And I think it's the right call.

We are building Bilig (thebilig.com) which is a dedicated reading space for newsletters. The whole premise is that people sit down, read a full newsletter issue, take notes, highlight passages, and come back tomorrow to do it again. It requires sustained attention. It rewards patience. It assumes the user actually wants to think.

By most conventional startup wisdom, this is a terrible idea.

The average person checks their phone 96 times a day. Social media engagement is fragmenting across 6–7 platforms simultaneously. TikTok has conditioned an entire generation to expect new stimulus every 8 seconds.

But the counter-movement is bigger than it looks.

Newsletter readership grew 40% year-over-year between 2023 and 2024. The newsletter industry is now worth $13.5 billion. Substack alone has over 17,000 paid writers. People are paying $10, $15, $30 a month for newsletters because they see value in having access to high-quality written content that offers genuine value.

There is a growing counter-culture of people who are exhausted by the feed and actively want something that respects their attention rather than exploiting it.

It is true that, as of now, the total addressable market is smaller than some of the other trendier niches. The product is not for everyone. But I think there will be a change of direction in the way people approach consuming content online.

And I think longer, well-thought-out content will make a come back.

I think those who build against dominant trends, rather than with them, tend to find less competition and more loyal users when they do find their people.

Curious whether others here have faced this decision. Are you building with the attention trend (faster, shorter, lower friction) or against it? And if you're building against it, how are you thinking about the size of that audience?