World Building

There’s a lane off Prithviraj Road in New Delhi, behind the old Survey of India building, where a Burmese couple runs a 6-seat coffee room called Slow.

No signboard. Just a brass bell on a green wooden door. You ring it. Someone opens. The smell hits you before you’re inside: dark roast, cardamom, a trace of burnt sugar from the jaggery they use in their signature pour-over.

The walls are bare plaster, the colour of milky chai. 6 mismatched chairs around 3 marble-top tables. A counter made from a single slab of reclaimed teak, scarred and oiled until it’s almost black.

They roast in-house, twice a week. They don’t do milk. They don’t do sugar. They’ll give you a small ceramic dish of palm jaggery if you ask, but they’d rather you didn’t.

They don’t call it a “menu.” It’s a “lot card,” a single sheet of handmade paper listing 4 beans by region and altitude. Ask for an espresso and Aye Myint will politely tell you they don’t do “extractions.” They do “steeps” and “pours.” It’s a small thing. But after your second visit, you find yourself using those words too.

There’s a leather guest book on the counter, held shut with a rubber band. Someone, in neat cursive, wrote: “I came here to think. I stayed because the room wouldn’t let me leave.”

No Instagram. No Google listing. No Zomato. An embassy driver mentioned it to a correspondent. A retired bureaucrat brought his daughter, who brought her cofounder, who brought her investor. Nobody came looking for good coffee. They came because someone told them, “there’s a room you need to sit in.”

Aye Myint didn’t promote anything. He built a room so specific, so itself that people couldn’t stop talking about it.

You’re probably wondering if this place is so special, why haven’t you heard about it?

Because it doesn’t exist.

I made the whole thing up, about 4 minutes ago.

But here’s what I want you to sit with: you were in that room. You could smell the roast. You were already planning to find it on your next trip to Delhi. You are mildly irritated because I took away a place you wanted to visit.

That irritation? That sense of loss for a place that never existed?

That’s ‘world building.’ And it’s the only content strategy that will survive the AI enshittification of content.

Every feed you scroll is AI-generated SEO slop now. Repurposed carousels. Comment ‘playbook’ to get access to AI-generated pdfs that say nothing. ChatGPT writes your competitor’s newsletter. It also writes their LinkedIn post. And their landing page. And their ad copy. And their lead magnet.

And yours too!?!?

When everyone has access to infinite content production, content regresses to mean: noise.

So what survives?

Taste.

Not taste as in aesthetics or visual flair. Taste as in decision-making.

Painter John Folley had the cleanest definition I’ve come across: “Good taste is simply to have a well-formed opinion, in accordance with the realities of the Good and the True.” Brie Wolfson, writing about this, put it even more plainly: there are tasteful and non-tasteful choices. Taste reveals its purveyor to be a good decision-maker.

That’s useful because it strips away the mystique. Taste isn’t some ineffable quality that some people have, and others don’t. It’s the ability to make good choices, consistently, over time. What to include. What to leave out. What to call things. What to refuse.

Bill Gates spent decades trying to understand Steve Jobs. When asked what he’d learned, the best he could manage was that Jobs had “intuitive taste, both for people and products” that seemed “magical.” The smartest technologist on earth couldn’t reverse-engineer it.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

Taste doesn’t stay small.

One good decision leads to another, and another, and if the person making them has a consistent point of view, those decisions start to cohere. They start to feel like they belong to the same place. The jaggery dish is ceramic, not steel. The guest book has a rubber band, not a clasp. No signboard. No milk. The menu is a “lot card.” None of these are branding choices made in a strategy meeting. They’re the accumulated result of one person’s taste, expressed through hundreds of small decisions over time.

When those decisions are consistent enough, they stop being choices and start becoming a world.

That’s the leap. Taste is individual.

A world is what happens when taste compounds.

A world has 5 components. Slow (fictional, bear with me) had all of them.

1. Ideology. A specific belief, strong enough to say no to things. Slow’s ideology was never written on a wall, but you felt it in every detail: coffee is a serious act, and seriousness requires restraint. Every decision flowed from a single conviction to say no.

2. Vocabulary. The words you use that people start borrowing. Aye Myint didn’t serve “espressos.” He did “steeps” and “pours.” The menu was a “lot card.” The best world-building vocabulary makes people feel “that’s a better word for it.” And then they start using it without thinking. That unprompted borrowing is the clearest sign a world is working.

3. Artifacts. The things that anchor you inside a world and make it real. In Slow, it was the ceramic jaggery dish, the leather guest book, the handmade lot card. Artifacts work the same way digitally. Stripe built a publishing house. Michelin made a restaurant guide. Both are objects so specific to their maker’s worldview that they became cultural landmarks. An artifact anchors you in a world and keeps pulling you back.

4. Texture. The aesthetic and emotional consistency that makes every touchpoint feel like it belongs to the same place. Bare plaster walls. Mismatched chairs. The scarred teak counter. The rubber band. None of these were “design choices” in the way a branding agency would make them. They were consequences of the ideology.

5. Inhabitants. A world needs people. But you don’t collect them. They self-select. Notice how Slow’s inhabitants arrived: someone told someone told someone. And the chain had a specific quality. Each person was the kind of person who’d value a room like that. They didn’t come looking for good coffee. They came because someone told them “there’s a room you need to sit in.”

Are you still thinking about the coffee room though?

Good. That pull, that lingering want for a place that was never real, is the whole argument in miniature.

Now imagine building that feeling around your actual work. Your brand. Your product. Your company. Something that could only have been built by someone with your specific taste, your specific set of refusals, your specific point of view.

Build worlds!

The people who belong in yours are already looking for it. They just need a room to walk into.