fantasy founder - UNsubscribe

What if, every month, instead of having something sent — you had something taken away?

How much would you spend to receive a bin in the mail every month that you fill up with things and leave on your doorstep to be taken away? So you have one less box-full of stuff. Every month. Would you do it? Could you do it? Could you do with less? Would you be willing to let go of the things you don’t need, don’t really want, don’t have any use for, don’t do anything with, take up space, take up part of your brain.. ?

What is having less worth?

There’s been an explosion of subscription services: razors, cookies, menswear, jerky, makeup, socks, and on and on. How many of those things actually get put to use and if not, sent back? How many of them end up a in a junk pile, at home or at the dump? Are we so wealthy, as a people, that we’re willing to continuously turn our resources into goods which do only one thing: accumulate? Is it possible to arrive at some stable amount of goods we own, at any point in our lives, such that the amount we acquire is matched by the amount we give away? What impact would that have on our mental and physical lives?

UNsubscribe wouldn’t be a storage service. It would be removal, donation, reduce, reuse, recycle as a service. The value created would be lightness. I doubt there’s a business model there. Would you be able to charge enough and would the tax write-offs and pittance made from donations, recycling, reuse or resale be enough such that the overhead of running the business would be covered? Could you turn a profit? Could it survive as a non-prof or a B corp? 

Better to want less, demand less, make less, and accumulate less in the first place. Our culture won’t allow it.

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This is part of an occasional series about products and companies that I’d like to see built, or build.