Would anyone miss your product if it vanished tomorrow? It's one of the best strategic questions you can ask, and it's just one part of the Worth-It Test.
Juju (Juliana Muñoz Uribe) is a strategist and writer whose Substack, Unfluence Lab, tracks how behaviour and meaning are shifting in tech. Her argument: as products mature, extraction creeps into the business model, meaning breaks, and users quietly stop caring. Her answer is a scorecard built on four pillars of meaning from social psychology, coherence, connection, contribution, and something bigger, that lets you audit any product, filter ideas, and work out whether what you're building is genuinely worth it. In this episode she opens it up on screen, scores real products with it, and then does something braver: she scores this podcast, live, with me pushing back on the grades.
We get into:
- The four pillars: does it hold together, does it create a space people return to unprompted, is it genuinely useful, does it serve something beyond the transaction
- The vanish test: would anyone miss it if it disappeared tomorrow
Live audits: Too Good To Go (where trust is cracking) and Cosmos (the intention economy done right)
- The self-audit: Juju scores In Practice, and I argue two of her grades down
- Using the scorecard to filter ideas now that building is no longer the bottleneck
- What to do when the scorecard tells you your work isn't worth it, and why frustration is the most useful emotion you have
- The shift from the attention economy to the intention economy
TRY IT YOURSELF
The scorecard comes from Juju's essay The Worth-It Test, read it, run it on your own product, and she'd genuinely love to hear how it went
https://unfluencelab.substack.com/p/t...
JUJU'S LINKS
Unfluence Lab, Juju's Substack on psycho-technology shifts: https://unfluencelab.substack.com
Juju on LinkedIn: / jujumunoz
d.MBA
Business education for designers: https://d.mba
00:00 "When extraction breaks meaning"
01:01 The conversation with Juju
01:30 Deleting Facebook: where the question started
02:57 The product playbook that erodes meaning
05:39 A model for "is it worth it?"
06:39 The four pillars of meaning
08:45 Turning the pillars into a scorecard
14:00 How the scoring works (0–3)
16:33 Auditing the DMBA podcast live
24:03 Real-world audits
30:06 The crisis of meaning
34:33 When your product isn't worth it
39:51 Final advice & where to find Juju
