Is Your Product Actually Worth It? (a scorecard)

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