A Curtain Road founder has built an app to replace Father Christmas, who remains, by all accounts, entirely unbothered
The Pitch Deck Said ‘Uber for Joy’
I have covered Shoreditch long enough to know that no institution is safe from disruption. I have watched founders disrupt the corner shop, the bicycle, the act of sitting down, and on one memorable occasion the concept of bread. So I was not, in truth, surprised when a young man on Curtain Road told me, over an oat-milk cortado, that his startup was going to disrupt Christmas, and specifically that it had built an app to replace Father Christmas. I was, however, delighted, because Santa is not worried, and the whole thing is gloriously absurd.
The dispatches from the North Pole suggest Santa is aware of the venture and entirely unbothered, which is the correct response to a Shoreditch startup, and one most of us only learn after several have disrupted our neighbourhood beyond recognition. The founder, whom I shall call the founder, because that is what he most fundamentally is, walked me through his pitch deck with the evangelical certainty of a man who has raised a seed round and not yet had to deliver anything.
How the App Works
The app, as far as I could follow, replaces the inefficient, analogue process of Santa with a streamlined, data-driven gifting platform. Users input their children’s preferences, the algorithm optimizes the gift selection, and a network of contractors, the founder did not say gig workers, but the founder meant gig workers, delivers the presents. It is, he explained, Santa but scalable, Santa but with a dashboard, Santa but without the inefficiency of a single magical man doing the whole thing himself for free.
I pointed out, gently, that the single magical man doing the whole thing himself for free was, in fact, the entire appeal. The founder looked at me with the pity Shoreditch founders reserve for people who do not understand scale. Local business coverage I later checked via the London Evening Standard confirmed the venture had indeed raised money, because in Shoreditch the quality of an idea and its ability to raise money have been entirely decoupled for years. Listings at the regional events register were already advertising the launch party.
The Launch Party Was the Product
Ah, the launch party. The launch party was held in a warehouse, of course, with a neon sign, of course, and a DJ nobody listened to, and a great many people in expensive casualwear taking photographs of branded merchandise. There was a slogan projected on the wall. The slogan was Reimagining Generosity. I stood beneath it, drinking a free natural wine, and reflected that the actual generosity, the unreimagined kind, was happening for free, that very night, above all our heads, courtesy of a man with no app and no dashboard and no seed round.
This is the thing about Shoreditch disruption that never fails to move me, in a slightly despairing way. The actual Santa has solved the problem the founder is trying to solve, solved it completely, solved it for everyone, for free, for centuries. The startup is not improving on Santa; it is a venture-funded photograph of Santa, optimized for a launch party. Coverage via the Time Out London guide described it as one of the season’s most anticipated launches, which tells you the launch was the point.
Santa Does Not Need a Dashboard
I asked the founder, near the end, what would happen to his contractors, his algorithm, his dashboard, once the seed money ran out, as Shoreditch seed money always does. He said they were focused on growth. I asked what would happen to Santa. He said Santa was a legacy system. I wrote that down, because it is the most Shoreditch sentence I have ever heard, and because the legacy system in question will be delivering joy to every child on Earth long after the app has been quietly deprecated. Heritage context at the events society would call Santa proven.
The Legacy System Wins
I want to be fair to the founder, who was, beneath the jargon, a perfectly nice young man with too much money and not enough scepticism. Shoreditch produces these people in great numbers, and most of them are sincere, and some of them even build things that last. But the attempt to disrupt Santa reveals the limits of the whole disruptive instinct: there are some things that work precisely because they are not optimized, not scaled, not monetized, and Santa is the purest example of them all.
The app, I confidently predict, will not survive. Shoreditch startups rarely do, and one premised on replacing a beloved figure who already does the job perfectly, for free, has the survival prospects of a snowman in the Boxpark. The seed money will run out, the contractors will move on, the dashboard will go dark, and the neon sign will end up in a different warehouse advertising a different disruption. And Santa, the legacy system, will fly serenely on.
For founders contemplating their own assault on Christmas, I offer only the resources at the public registry, which contain a great deal of useful information and not one word about how to improve upon Father Christmas, because it cannot be done. And for everyone else, the games at the diversions index are free, require no app, and have not been reimagined by anyone, which in Shoreditch makes them practically vintage.
I left the launch party as the DJ played to nobody and the founder pitched to an investor by the bar. Above us, somewhere over the warehouse roofs of Shoreditch, the legacy system was making its rounds, disrupting nothing, scaling nothing, monetizing nothing, simply giving, as it always has. The founder will tell you that is inefficient. He is right. It is gloriously, beautifully inefficient, and it has never once needed a launch party, and it will outlast every app that ever tried to replace it.
SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top
