What Beta Taught Us: Effort Is the Constraint

What Beta Taught Us About Stories and Effort

TL;DR: Our beta showed that people deeply value stories, but effort prevents them from becoming habitual. The constraint isn’t desire or quality, it’s effort across recall, creation, and completion. Our focus is now on systematically removing that effort and measuring behavior change when we do.

For as long as people have had photos, they have wanted stories.

Not captions.

Not highlights.

Actual stories that explain what happened, why it mattered, and how it felt.

That desire isn’t new. What’s new is the belief that stories might finally scale.

When we started our beta, we believed something simple: if people were given the right tools, they would want to turn their most important moments into stories.

Beta taught us something more uncomfortable, and far more useful.

People loved the idea.

They loved the output.

They did not love the work.

Across the beta, users consistently told us the same things:

• The stories felt meaningful

• The recaps were something they wanted to keep

• Sharing them felt different than sharing photos

  
  

And then usage dropped.

Most users completed a story, shared it, felt the delight, and stopped.

The value was clear.

The cost prevented it from compounding.

Writing is work.

Remembering details is work.

Coordinating other people is work.

Finding the right photos or videos is work.

Editing anything into a finished state is work.

Many users told us they knew the story they wanted to tell but couldn’t quickly find the media that belonged with it. In some cases, they couldn’t find it at all.

There was another issue we didn’t expect to hear as often as we did: people genuinely forgot moments had even happened.

Photos didn’t just support the story.

They triggered it.

But scrolling through thousands of images to rediscover meaningful moments was itself a form of effort most people simply wouldn’t do.

Without recall, stories never even enter the funnel.

This wasn’t a product failure. It was a pattern.

Once we stopped looking at individual features and started looking at behavior, the pattern became clear:

• Delight was high

• Intent was high

• Completion was the bottleneck

• Repeat behavior collapsed when effort stayed high

  
  

The system delivered value initially and then broke under its own weight.

In practice, this meant some of the most important stories never had a chance to exist. Not because they weren’t meaningful, but because nothing surfaced them and the work required to reconstruct them was too high.

That forced us to confront a harder question:

If people have always wanted stories, why have stories never scaled?

The uncomfortable truth is simple.

Stories have always required effort.

Storage didn’t scale until saving became automatic.

Sharing didn’t scale until distribution became effortless.

Stories never crossed that threshold.

Caring was never the constraint.

Effort was.

Every previous attempt at scaling stories asked people to sit down, remember, find the right media, write, edit, organize, and complete something.

That works for professionals and hobbyists. It does not scale to everyday life.

Beta made this impossible to ignore.

Effort is not a UX problem. It’s the constraint.

When people are together, they don’t need to be convinced to tell stories.

The moment someone says, “remember when…,” a story unfolds without effort.

The desire has never been the problem.

The friction appears when we try to formalize storytelling into systems that demand work.

Once we reframed the problem this way, everything changed.

The core challenge is not creativity.

It's not content generation.

It's not even quality.

It’s effort across the entire path to completion.

In this domain, effort shows up in multiple forms:

• Cognitive effort: knowing what to say

• Coordination effort: getting others to contribute

• Recall effort: remembering which moments are worth revisiting

• Capture effort: finding and assembling the right media and context

• Editing effort: making it presentable

• Completion effort: getting to done

  
  

If any one of these stays high, the system breaks.

Beta didn’t just show us where users dropped.

It showed us why stories never became habitual.

What this changes for us

We no longer think in terms of features first.

We think in terms of one question:

What effort can we remove next, and does behavior change when we do?

If behavior doesn’t change, nothing else matters.

That means prioritizing measurements we didn’t emphasize before:

• Time to first completed story

• Steps required to reach done

• Whether people create a second story

  
  

These aren’t vanity metrics. They’re signals of whether effort is actually falling.

A broader implication

AI didn’t create the desire for stories. That desire shows up any time people gather. It just rarely survives contact with systems that demand work.

What AI may finally change is the ability to surface moments people would otherwise lose to time, volume, and human forgetting, and reduce the effort required to turn those moments into stories.

Storage scaled when effort disappeared.

Sharing scaled when effort disappeared.

We believe stories will follow the same pattern.

Not because people suddenly care more.

But because, for the first time, effort can realistically be reduced.

This is the first post in a series documenting what we’re learning as we explore this constraint and what it takes to remove it. Each post will focus on one constraint, one measurement, and one implication.

Our focus is not on making stories more impressive.

It's on making them possible at scale.