Why are founders going anti-algorithm
Welcome back to The Current.
This is where we gather real founder conversations across social media to track what’s on their radar right now.
This month, the conversation has shifted to the ‘Anti-Algorithm’ approach. Founders are dropping the quest for virality for raw, unpolished content, moving their most important conversations into private groups, and taking back control of their tech stacks.
3 Things Founders Talk About In Mar’ 26
Real beats polished
Founder branding has been a key growth engine for new startups and we are seeing founders are moving away from the “LinkedIn Guru” aesthetic, towards being unpolished.
When everything online looks AI-generated, being raw is what actually cuts through. If a social media post looks too perfect, people assume a bot wrote it and scroll away.
Going private
The most valuable conversations are no longer happening on public feeds. Founders are shifting their focus to “private tribes” on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord. They rather have 100 true believers in a private chat than 10,000 followers who never see their posts due to frequent and opaque algorithm changes on social platforms.
Owning your stack
There’s a growing push to move off the big tech platforms. Instead of defaulting to the usual cloud giants, builders are looking for ways to own their data and infrastructure. It’s about better margins and more control, making sure their business isn’t one platform update away from disappearing.
The Reality Check
Sakura Seet
Co-Founder
Perfingo
Building trust is a lot more emotional than we realise. Through my work at Perfingo to help individuals navigate the complexities of personal finance, I noticed people are struggling with so much fear and pressure to look like they’ve figured it all out. Though bots can optimise tips and the math of finance, they can’t hold space for how people actually feel about money. That trust can only be built with human connection.
I echo the shift to private groups as I saw the change in our user community when we moved beyond social media content and into DMs, meetups, and events. The interactions amongst users and with us changed in texture, for the better. These private spaces are necessary because the topics we deal with are quite sensitive.
We found that you don’t need huge numbers – for a workshop, even a small group of about 13 people is a great ‘sweet spot.’ It becomes a culture of its own and you can’t really manufacture such relationships with AI.
The Bottom Line
“Listening to our users helped us see that people don’t just need dashboards; they need reassurance and accountability. I would ask founders to do the things that don’t scale first: talk to people individually and then build from these lived conversations.”
“Having those first 10 or 50 people who believe in you and trust you deeply is the way to build something powerful.”