Can a Better Social Media Platform Fix What’s Broken? (With Andrew Christodoulides)-Ep #188

Yeah, I think, look, I think part of the reason why it's happening on these other platforms is largely based on how they're monetizing. And so very simply as predominantly advertising revenue models, they are incentivized to keep users in feeds as long as possible, right? There's a direct correlation between how much time they're spending in feeds and the revenue being

generated for these companies. Unfortunately, the things that keep us in feeds long has happened to be the very things that are most damaging to us. We're going through something absolutely historic. Technologies across the board are growing exponentially. It's a disruption that's going to completely redefine the way businesses

compete. In the next decade, we're going to lose 40% of these Fortune 500 companies. The exponential growth of computing is continuing. AI is no one near its full potential. Whether you like it or not, that the future cannot be stopped by anyone.

you. But what happens when you try to build a platform from scratch that focuses on authentic, meaningful experiences instead of endless scrolling and superficial engagement? In this episode, Mark speaks with Andrew about the evolution of a new kind of social media platform, one built not around clicks and ads, but around authenticity and shared human

experience. They explore the platform's roots in contextual commerce, its shift toward mental health-conscious design and how AI is being used to support meaningful behavior instead of addictive engagement. The conversation covers the problem of negative reward systems, potential safeguards against

platform misuse, and the long-term vision for a more values-aligned digital community. They also discuss the possibility of crowdfunding and the emerging role of community rounds in platform development. Andrew Christodolides is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience.

His first venture, Asina, AB2B outsourcing startup, began with $500 from his parents' basement and was acquired by a strategic partner. He went on to create Original Pad, an e-commerce platform that redefined home decor shopping. Andrew then founded We Live Incorporated, which evolved from a contextualized search

platform to a plaudible, a social media platform focused on meaningful storytelling and celebrating life's impactful moments. Hi, Andrew, thank you very much for coming onto the podcast today.

It's good to have, you're out in Barcelona, so it's good to be tied back to where I was for several years, and interested to hear what you guys have going on.

Yeah, sounds good. Happy to be here. Yeah, so you're working on a new social media platform. We mentioned right before recording

There's quite a long history or an anecdote that brought you into this world. If you could share some aspect of that, I think it would be quite interesting for myself

and the audience as to why you created one, because I think there's generally the people that I've interviewed that are doing something like this. They have quite a unique perspective

on why this is needed, whereas most of us are just kind of using these platforms without thinking about it too much. Yeah, thanks for the question.

So I think there are a couple of different ways that we arrived here. And it happened to be at a very ideal time based on, I think, you know, all-time high dissatisfaction with the big platforms that everybody's using and, you know, consensus around the negative mental health effects,

especially among younger users. So the short answer to how we got here is we started a completely different business and it evolved into this. We were in a, I was in an E-com focused on mid to higher end home furnishings. Okay. And it's an interesting category because it's not represented by recognizable

brands the way every other consumer product category on the planet is. And so when you couple that with the relatively high ticket nature of the products. It makes it hard to convert customers through digital channels. And so we were dealing with that for a while, and we had come up with a concept to address that problem, which was contextualization. We

thought we would build a what we call the contextualized search and shopping experience for home furnishings, whereby we were curating photos of real people's homes, and we had built some tech to identify the objects in those photos. And we had turned that into a search and shopping experience where you could essentially

find what you're looking for through photos of people's homes and then buy them right from those photos. The short of that is at some point we realized that the same way we were acquiring users and getting them to share personal experiences, which at that point was limited to photos of

their homes, that could be applied much more broadly. And eventually that turned into a platform where users share any experience that they value or that they appreciate in such a way that it inspires or informs similar experiences in the lives of others.

So places that they go, things that they do, and the chandeliers hanging over their head as we had intended to do from the beginning. That was sort of like the product trajectory to how we got here. Interestingly, when we released the first version of the product, we had come into

it based on this marketplace or e-com kind of like legacy idea. And we had a very transactional mindset as a result. thought essentially any experience that somebody shares unapplaudable, somebody else can repeat, right? You can tap and buy or reserve. And what we ended up seeing is that a lot of the

experiences that users were sharing were not that, right? They were not commercial, transactable experiences, right? They were things that were much more intangible and personal, failure, successes, people, environments, aspirations, inspirations, and interestingly, that ties unbelievably well to interests, I would even say kind of like fascinations that I've had

since I was as far back as I can remember as a kid. I've always been like unusually curious