Base APAC

In July, we sat around a conference room table discussing whether to shut down Noise. Eight months of runway. A year of work behind us. And the uncomfortable realization that what we’d spent so long building wasn’t working. To understand how we got there, you have to go back to May 2025. We’d just released our first demo. A way to trade trends using social media attention as a measure of their value. We woke up to hundreds of signups. Tens of thousands followed in the months after. We were young, building in New York, and the internet was telling us we were right. So we raised money and got to work. The trouble with early success is that you can mistake enthusiasm for conviction. We felt we owed everyone the exact product they’d seen, even as we began discovering its flaws. The deeper we went, the more we learned how easily attention could be manufactured. The numbers we wanted people to trade on could be bought by anyone with a marketing budget. We were building an enormous amount of infrastructure around a model we were increasingly unsure of. And for months, we kept pushing forward. Meanwhile, our users were showing us something else. We’d added a little button that let people suggest trends. Every suggestion landed in our team Slack. The channel kept pinging. We started rewarding a handful of those users when others engaged with their trend discoveries. Their activity increased 5x! Even after the experiment ended, the group kept coming back. We’d spent a year trying to measure what the internet cared about. But our users were showing us what we’d believed in from the beginning: people discover things worth caring about. So we built a way for people to curate trends directly in the app. It became the most-used part of Noise. It was the simplest thing we’d built. And the closest we’d come to the reason we started. For the first time in months, we knew where we wanted to focus. There’s enormous value in discovering something before the rest of the world does. But people with taste rarely participate in the value they help create. We started Noise to change that. And after a year of mistakes, difficult decisions, and more complexity than we’d ever imagined, we’re returning to that simple belief with more conviction than ever. The soul of Noise is people discovering things they believe in. Curation is the core product behind that. Today, Noise is live on TestFlight. The first 100 spots are in the post below. Come show us what we’re missing.