[crowcroft]

I used to work for a small business accounting software company.

We used to talk about reducing the amount of time people use the product. Doing accounting is NOT what small business owners should be spending time on, and our goal was to reduce the amount of time spent.

As the company got bigger, we started selling adjacent software, and suddenly time spent in the 'ecosystem' became an important factor for increasing revenue per user and the rest is history.

Especially in the B2B space with sales reps, it's hard to sell people on things they don't have to do.

[safety1st]

The average American adult now spends 8.5 hours consuming digital media every day, including games.

Most of it is probably consumed for entertainment purposes (news, social media etc. - social media's share averages to around 2.5 hours per day). Have we considered that maybe we're just spending too much time on entertainment? As opposed to doing things that actually make us better, like studying, practicing a skill or exercising.

[digging]

> Have we considered that maybe we're just spending too much time on entertainment?

No, I doubt it, unless you have some data that the advent of digital entertainment has changed our entertainment habits. (I think it's a separate question when it comes to social media + smartphones, which work very very hard to steal our attention.) People don't work all day long. Before we had digital media, people entertained themselves with social visits, theater, drinking, reading, meditation... basically all the things we still do outside of digital entertainment.

[hn72774]

This is a good insight.

"First pass yield" was a metric I liked in the accounting and payments space. How many transactions went through without requiring a manual touch.