If you’re reading this, you waste a lot of time on social media. I mostly say this because if you know about S³ this early, you’re probably pretty active on Twitter.

For episode 9 of S³ I met with the cofounders of Clearspace who have a solution to your phone addiction and a vision for the future of how we could better interact with technology.

What is Clearspace?

Currently, it’s relatively simple.

You tell Clearspace which apps you have a problem with and when you try to open one it will force you to wait 10 seconds. It won’t flat out block you, unless you’ve hit your set daily limit.

This simple 10 second period, without any way to override it as you can do with Apple’s current screen time controls, is a simple yet powerful way to deal with compulsive clicks.

As Royce and Oliver both separately described to me, it’s way easier to be fully abstinent than to rate limit anything we want to do as a human.

I know this to be true from my experience dieting last year. I chose not to drink alcohol for 4 months and it was incredibly easy versus trying to limit myself to 1-2 drinks a week for the following 4 months.

Oliver and Royce have successfully built Clearspace to be a technology layer that takes tons of friction out of app rate limiting, giving you a ton of ease and control so you don’t have to be fully abstinent from amazing yet addictive apps.

An insane realization

During our prewriting call, Royce dropped a metaphor bomb which Oliver followed up with concrete examples that blew my mind.

“It was only in the last 15 years that fast food restaurants began putting calories on their menus, before that it wasn’t required — we’re living in that world right now with technology. We have no concept of what proteins, carbs, and fats are as they relate to screen time,” Royce explained to me over a zoom call.

Oliver followed up with some examples:

• Lung cancer risk associated with cigarettes

• Surgeon general’s warnings on alcohol for pregnancy

• Seatbelts

• The idea of a healthy diet

These are all obvious now, but they weren’t always obvious.

Royce and Oliver believe that’s the world we’re living in now with technology, a lack of understanding of its impacts and no way to parse said impacts.

We have no idea what’s healthy, what’s not, and how to quantify it.

My mind was blown by this and quickly became excited to imagine what humanity and Clearspace might do to try and solve this.

They have a LOT of users

Despite how early they are, Clearspace has A LOT of users. I know this via a few channels, but the two I’ll talk about are how many people Tweeted/DM’d me asking for Clearspace to be featured on S³ as well as the fact they have caused over 10 million compulsive click blocks. 10 million!

This raises the question, who uses Clearspace?

Right now they break it down into 3 main categories:

• Founders, investors — people in the tech world (this may be a result of their Y Combinator participation & tech adjacency)

• Content creators — people who have more than the average metric engagement on social media

• Parents — mostly new ones who want to set a positive example for their kids

A Y Combinator, cofounder love story

I have to bring this up because it’s so damn cute (and inspiring).

I first heard about Royce and Oliver from this tweet. I was struck by how genius of a marketing play it was, but also how short of a time they have known each other.

Upon spending time with them in a prewriting call, filming with them, and having a great lunch after filming, I had a few thoughts:

• These guys are seriously dedicated to what they’re building, not only that but they are juiced about it

• I can’t believe they haven’t been friends since they were single digit ages, they’re natural collaborators and friends

• They are yin and yang’d to each other — Royce with his inspiring energy and Oliver with his stoic focus are a great balance

Clearspace is just getting started

The current product today is having major impact in people’s lives, but they’re just warming up.

They envision a future where Clearspace can step in on any device, platform, or software that you may have a problem with. Further than that, they imagine diving into said software and modifying its components to tailor the experience to an insane degree.

They give a great example of this relating to LinkedIn — a tool that’s great for connecting with people but isn’t exactly known for quality content on its feed.

At the end of the day, Royce and Oliver are saving lives — or life time per se.

To date, let’s assume that each of those 10 million interactions they’ve stopped would have been a 30 minute scroll session.

That is 5 million hours saved.

Thanks again Royce and Oliver for agreeing to be featured, being so flexible in the shipping of this episode, and for the wonderful lunch conversation. I look forward to many more.

Keep on building the future,

— Jason