Creating Anti-Enshittification Business Model Frameworks

[andalibmalit]

A company's business model determines both its survival strategy and its obligations to users. Too many tech companies build products designed to trap customers and extract maximum shareholder value. Even companies with good intentions get pulled into enshittification through investor pressure, market dynamics, customer disempowerment, and network effects.

Challenge: Create a novel and well-designed framework that technology companies can adopt to resist enshittification while remaining sustainable.

Your framework MUST include:

• At least ONE novel element (new governance structure, original metric, innovative accountability mechanism, untested revenue model, or unique user voice mechanism)
• At least THREE of these five business model concepts: governance structures, success metrics, accountability mechanisms, revenue models, and trade-off protocols
• Clear navigation structure - choose a format that makes your framework easy to navigate and apply
• At least TWO worked examples showing application to different contexts (e.g., startup vs. scale-up, consumer vs. B2B, open-source vs. proprietary)

Deliverable Format Options:

Choose one or combine multiple:

• Structured wiki/documentation with clear TOC and sections
• Interactive decision tree or assessment tool
• Visual playbook with diagrams and progressive disclosure
• Comparison matrix with trade-off analysis
• Other well-organized format

What "Well-Designed" Means:

• Easy to navigate (TOC, clear sections, or interactive UI)
• Scannable structure (headers, bullet points, tables, callouts)
• Concrete examples embedded throughout
• Progressive disclosure (summary → details)
• Visual aids where helpful (diagrams, tables, flowcharts)

Completeness Checklist:

Minimum requirements:

• At least one genuinely novel element
• At least three of five business model concepts above addressed
• Clear navigation/organization
• Two concrete worked examples

Excellence criteria:

• All five business concepts addressed
• Clear adoption pathway for different company stages
• Identified limitations and edge cases

Examples to analyze:

• Platform cooperatives (Stocksy, Resonate)
• Foundation models (Wikipedia, Signal, Mozilla)
• Public benefit corporations (Kickstarter, Patagonia)
• Sustainable indie software (Hey, Ghost)
• Worker-owned tech (Glitch, Loomio)

Key questions:

• How do you measure "humane" outcomes quantitatively?
• What legal/financial structures enable long-term thinking?
• How do you make inevitable trade-offs transparent to users?
• Can the framework work at startup scale? At platform scale?

Resources: 

• Humane Tech principles
• Time Well Spent metrics
• B Lab's impact assessment
• Zebras Unite's framework

[alexanderwcheney]

Creating Anti-enshittification Business Model Frameworks

Introducing Key Feedback Loops (KFLs)

Summary:

To resist enshittification, technology companies can adopt key feedback loops, rather than key performance indicators, whereby all customer value (framework TBD) is mapped to business value (revenue, attention, etc), and optimize for maximizing customer value rather than maximizing business value. If companies focus on maximizing long-term customer value, revenue will also follow. Companies should bucket traditional KPIs into a customer value framework and map company goods, services, and features through feedback loops to these values. Not all customer value will map directly back to company revenue, and that is okay.

Guiding Principles:

• Relationships > Money. Prioritizing relationships with customers leads to more money in the long-run. When you have no customers, you have no money. When you share your value with a customer, you have a relationship.
• Obliquity (John Kay), why goals are often best achieved indirectly.
• Systems & Feedback Loops (Donella Meadows).
• Businesses only have direct control over their own operations, they don’t have any direct control over how much revenue they take in (all of it has to come from somewhere else, unless they are the US Mint).

General Process:

1. Come up with a customer values framework.
2. For whatever your company does, map out how its product/services deliver customer value across that framework.
3. Identify the key feedback loops (KFLs) that generate revenue (or other company metric) upon delivery of that value.
4. Prioritize maximal delivery of customer value.
5. Monitor strength of feedback loop connections.
6. Try new feedback loops and prune ones that no longer serve customers or the business.

Customer Values Framework.

This is where the business has maximum leeway in how they want to define the value they provide to their customer. Examples include: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Humane Tech’s Framework:

• Cared for: Your needs are at the center of the experience.
• Present: You feel more present in body and mind.
• Fulfilled: You are satisfied with your experience and outcomes.
• Connected: You connect to yourself, others, or nature.

The Four Value Archetypes

The matrix uses the two core tensions as its axes:

• Vertical Axis: The focus on Self versus the focus on Others.
• Horizontal Axis: The motivation for Stability versus the motivation for Growth. (i.e. Explore/Exploit)

	Stability (Conservation)	Growth (Change)
Focus on Self	### The Guardian 🏰 Values personal security, power, and tradition. This archetype is motivated to protect their own status, resources, and established ways of doing things. Key Values: Security, Power, Tradition.	### The Trailblazer 🚀 Values personal achievement, freedom, and excitement. This archetype is motivated to advance themselves through new experiences and demonstrating competence. Key Values: Achievement, Self-Direction, Stimulation.
Focus on Others	### The Communitarian 🤝 Values social harmony, conformity, and the well-being of their group. This archetype is motivated to maintain stable relationships and protect the community. Key Values: Conformity, Benevolence, Security.	### The Changemaker 🌍 Values social justice, creativity, and a better future for all. This archetype is motivated to challenge the status quo for the good of others and humanity. Key Values: Universalism, Benevolence, Self-Direction.

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One of the reasons enshittification happens is because some parts of the business are harder to tie back to revenue than others. When investor pressure, market dynamics, customer disempowerment, and network effects happen, it becomes very logical to focus on outcomes that produce money for the company so that the company survives. As a result, features or products customers love get cut and the company survives for the next round of enshittification.

Two ways businesses enshittify their products are delivering lower customer value for the same price (shrinkflation), or charging more for the same price (inflation). This framework resists this practice by:

• allowing business to generate and point to specific feedback loops that allow them to optimize the factors that indirectly drive business value by providing an increased amount of value to customers.
• enabling better product decisions by better understanding the customer’s “why” behind product use.
• focusing the business on what it can control, which is customer-value outputs, not what it can’t (revenue inputs).
• clear accountability for why something fails (business stopped providing customer value tied to a business value loop).

Case Studies

Coca-Cola

As a KPI, every bottle purchased provides some form of value to the customer and the company. The company receives money and the customer receives some value, however the quadrants this value is placed in can be difficult to ascribe. If it’s someone’s first Coke, then this would primarily be a Focus on Self and Growth (or Change), because the customer is trying something new for the first time. If it’s someone’s one-hundredth bottle of Coke, then it’s clear that they like the taste.

Share a Coke campaign: We can apply bottles purchased for this campaign (with individual names) to the “Focusing on Others” quadrants instead of Focusing on Self because it’s supposed to be social and connect people.

Spotify

As a KPI, Spotify has subscriber revenue and ads. It may be difficult to ascribe a subscription to the values framework above, but here’s what it could look like. We can assume that a new subscriber is probably looking for Growth for themselves, but if they continue to subscribe, then the value provided to them is stability (Conservation). Additionally, Spotify tracks the number of minutes a user listens to in a given timeframe. If they listen to their liked songs, those minutes watched should be ascribed to (Conservation and Stability), but if they are listening to Spotify’s tailored Discover Weekly, then minutes watched are for Growth (Change). Sharing a playlist they made or creating one with a friend fit into the Focus on Others (Stability) and Focus on Others (Growth), respectively.

Drawbacks

• It takes more work, and it’s opaque as to how to ascribe customer value to a business’s product or service (furthermore, it’s context dependent). But, this discovery process will get a business closer to the “why” their business succeeds by providing value to the customer, which is critical for any business.
• Only applicable in B2C, because consumers (humans) have different needs than businesses.

Public Document Link

Note, this was put together for Humane Tech's Hackathon in Oct 2025. This is an MVP. Feedback appreciated.