The thing that makes diino possible in 2026 is that the marginal cost of producing a piece of content — a quiz, a short tool, a newsletter, a video — has dropped close to zero. Not zero, but close enough that one person can plausibly run five small projects in parallel without the math collapsing.
That is the entire premise. There's no “media company” thesis behind diino, no funding round, no plan to hire. It's a one-year experiment in whether a solo operator can maintain five distinct cultural projects at the same time and have at least one of them resonate with a real audience.
The honest framing: I don't know which one will work, so I'm running five and giving each about a year. The portfolio is the hedge.
What launched first: notgenz
The first experiment is How NOT GenZ are you? — a 15-question satirical reverse quiz that grades how millennial, Gen-X, or older a respondent's daily habits read as. The instinct most quiz makers follow is “which X are you,” flattering people into a tribe. Reverse quizzes — “how much not X are you” — are funnier because they're mildly accusatory, and the share mechanic works because people forward roasts faster than compliments.
notgenz is in US English, aimed at the American cultural-internet audience. That choice is deliberate: the joke depends on a shared set of references (specific brands, specific behaviors, specific phrasings) and the US market is where those references are densest. A Korean-language version would be a different product, not a translation.
The first launch confirmed two things and surprised me with a third. First confirmed: the satirical reverse format does in fact travel — early visitors were finishing the quiz and forwarding the result image without prompting. Second confirmed: solo distribution is slow. There is no growth hack. The third, which surprised me, is that the questions people remember are not the funniest ones — they're the ones that feel most uncomfortably specific. That changes how I write the next batch.
What's coming
Four experiments remain. The categories are decided; the names and formats are not. I'm holding the names back partly because announcing a thing pre-launch is a form of false precommitment, and partly because I'd like to actually finish each one before discussing it.
- One short-form video play.
- One micro-tool — small, useful, no AI demo wrapper.
- One writing-first project on a slow cadence.
- One collaborative experiment with a friend.
The cadence target is roughly one launch every two to three months. That gives each experiment time to find an audience before the next one demands attention, and lets me absorb feedback into the next one's design.
A note to other solo operators
If you're running similar experiments — solo, content-first, no venture funding, trying to figure out which idea has signal — I would genuinely like to compare notes. The peer group for this kind of work is thin and asynchronous and that's a problem worth solving informally over email.
Write to martin.jhchoi@gmail.com. More about the operating model on the about page.