When the founder behind the fitness mirror decided what to build next, she didn't pick an AI startup. Brynn Putnam pioneered the at-home workout market by bolting a screen onto a mirror, then sold the company, Mirror, to Lululemon. Her new venture is called Board — a startup built around getting people into the same room to play games together in person. Investors wrote the checks anyway.
Around the same time, AI startups were breaking their own funding records every quarter. While OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest of the top tier pulled in tens of billions of dollars, someone else was betting on people rolling dice around a table. The fact that both directions coexist in the same investment market points to something more than a curious counterexample.
What Cyberdecks and Board Games Have in Common
Starting in late 2024, odd DIY-gadget videos began circulating on social media: cyberdecks. These are handmade portable devices that combine a small computer like a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and a tiny monitor. The point isn't practicality — it's the build itself, styled after gear out of a cyberpunk novel. The videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and a whole builder community grew up around them.
Board is a far more commercial bet. Putnam had a front-row seat to why Mirror's growth stalled once the pandemic ended: solitary at-home workouts in front of a screen were quickly swapped out the moment gyms reopened. She knew exactly what that shift revealed Mirror had never captured — physical space, and the presence of other people.
Cyberdecks and Board differ in genre, scale, and business model. Where they overlap is this: both depend on something that's only complete when a user physically shows up and shares a space with other people — territory a screen struggles to replace.
Offline Demand Isn't Just an AI Backlash
One way to read this trend is as "AI fatigue" or a digital backlash. It's a fair observation: rising screen time and rising demand for offline experiences are showing up in the same window of time.
But "backlash" alone doesn't explain everything. Planted aquascaping — building a miniature underwater ecosystem by grading substrate and planting aquatic greenery by hand — predates the smartphone and is still growing steadily in the middle of the AI boom. What people get out of leveling soil and placing plants is the feeling of designing, observing, and producing a result with their own hands. Classes teaching the hobby, books built around those classes, and communities that keep going regardless of algorithm changes — that trajectory has run on for years, independent of any platform shift. A mere backlash wouldn't sustain that kind of long arc.
That said, skepticism toward offline-experience startups is well founded too. Even before Covid, plenty of social-dining platforms, immersive art museums, and escape-room operators raised money and then quietly disappeared. Investors keep raising the same point: experiential businesses don't scale. Netflix can ship to the entire world at once; a board-game night is stuck in one city, one room. How Putnam's Board plans to work around that structural limit hasn't been made public. Raising money and building sustainable revenue are two different problems.
Still, these founders' backgrounds are worth a closer look. Putnam has already made a tech-driven hardware product work. Cyberdeck builders, for their part, are steeped in software and electronics. When people who are fluent in technology deliberately choose to strip it away, that reads less as a rejection of technology and more as a precise pointer to exactly where technology falls short.
The Price Premium Is Moving Off-Screen
In Korea, offline community businesses have long been undervalued on the grounds that they don't scale. But a few of the underlying conditions have shifted.
The online content market is more saturated than it has ever been. The number of channels covering any given topic has multiplied, and per-view revenue keeps sliding. Offline classes and workshops, by contrast, are pulling their per-head price further and further ahead of online rates. People are traveling to a physical space for what a screen can't give them — and paying a premium for that trip.
Community structure differs too. A YouTube subscriber leaves the moment a more interesting channel shows up. A member of a group that meets regularly in person churns far more slowly. Once relationships have formed in a shared space, something beyond content quality decides who stays.
For solo operators, there's a concrete thing worth checking: if your business already involves something that's only complete when a person handles it directly, consider splitting that piece off into an offline class or a small workshop. An aquascaping class commands a higher price than a video covering the same material precisely because that process doesn't transmit through a screen. It's the same reason a board-game café outlasts the app version of the same game.
If you're already running a community, it's worth considering restructuring it as an independent revenue unit rather than a support channel for your online presence. An offline community that runs on membership fees doesn't have to answer to a platform algorithm.
There's one condition, though. A vague feeling that "analog is nice" isn't enough to make people pay. What participants learn, make, or connect to — and what specific result they can only get outside a screen — has to be clear.
Putnam didn't choose board games because offline feels good. She confirmed the limits of solitary, screen-based workouts with data first, then changed direction. As products that sell precisely because they get the screen turned off start to find their footing, I think the more useful move isn't debating whether this is a passing trend — it's checking whether some part of your own business could already command an offline price.
