# Tortoise Mode

> Principles of building calmly over the long term

**Published by:** [Le Blog du Matt](https://paragraph.com/@matt/)
**Published on:** 2026-07-16
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@matt/tortoise-mode

## Content

I built Tortoise because I believe there is money being left on the table for musicians. I think streaming has led to music being over-commoditized. I believe people are hungry for more of the things that make music special. Connection, humanity, identity, and most importantly, feeling something. So many people are starved of feeling and life, and I think products like Tortoise, built on human relationships instead of algorithms, and monetized without appeasing the lowest bidder, can play an important role in taking our souls back from the digital succubi in our pockets. This orientation against the role consumer software traditionally plays is why the platform is called Tortoise. In an industry that moves quickly toward specific goals and "KPIs", Tortoise explores freely and calmly. In an industry obsessed with a shiny tinfoil-wrapped hypertechnocapitalist future, Tortoise embraces ancient forms. Over time, the Tortoise brand has shifted from something shaped by the product's intended values to the name itself being the main driving force behind it. The name has ended up being more fitting and inspiring than I imagined. It has helped solidify Tortoise's guiding principles: Patience Patience is Tortoise's relationship to time. Tech moves fast, and when you are actively launching products it feels even faster. It feels like every day is a race against the clock and if you ever let up you will not survive. The issue with that mentality is that it leads to burnout, and when you burn out, that is when your startup actually dies. Patience looks like: shipping when it's ready, not when the timeline says. Measuring in years, not weeks. Never manufacturing urgency for users, because urgency is how you get people to act against their own interests. We don't need constant wins and we don't need to always move quickly. We just need to keep moving. Resilience Resilience is Tortoise's relationship to weight. The tortoise is not simply protected by its shell. Its shell is part of its underlying skeletal structure. Likewise, resilience is an integral part of Tortoise's design. It means music and relationships live onchain, where they are not easily affected by the whims of companies. It means operating costs are taken on mindfully and kept low. It means the health of the community is judged by how well we support each other, not by how many members it contains. It means bear markets are not a death sentence. Carrying a shell on our back slows us down, but its worth carrying that extra weight for the peace of mind of knowing that we are prepared for the future. Ancient Roots Ancient Roots are Tortoise's compass. Tortoises and turtles have been around for about 200 million years, and for nearly as long as humans have told stories, we've put the world on their backs. In Hindu mythology, Kurma the tortoise held up the mountain that churned the ocean so the gods could recover immortality. Many Native North American nations like the Iroquois know their continent as Turtle Island, formed on a turtle's back. Early China read the shell itself as a map of the cosmos, with the dome of heaven above, the plate of earth below. The Maya painted the maize god reborn from a cracked turtle shell. These cultures never met. They looked at the same animal and independently saw the same thing: a foundation stable enough to build a world on. There are even ancient ties to music. The first lyre of the Greeks was called the chelys, their word for tortoise, because its soundbox was a hollowed shell. In the Homeric Hymn, Hermes finds a tortoise at his mother's doorstep and makes it "a singer." Halfway across the world, with no contact, turtle shells were struck as rattles and drums in ancient China. So when the trend of the moment is loud, this principle asks one question: what has already survived? Music has, and so has the way humans share it. For nearly all of its history, music wasn't something we consumed alone. It was something people did together, and the oldest way of valuing it isn't royalties or ad-supported playlists. It's patronage: people directly supporting the musicians whose work moves them. Music, like the tortoise, is a window into an ancient force that was here long before the internet and will outlast whatever comes after it. We build on that. Not on trends. On the shell of the world. GTM(Going Tortoise Mode) Strategy Every startup needs a GTM strategy and Tortoise is no different. Going Tortoise Mode allows the community and me to zoom out and see past whatever happens to be trending in the current moment. It reminds us to breathe, find stillness, and think deeply. It reminds us to slow down and spend time making music. Not for the purpose of maximizing streaming revenue. Just because it's what we do.

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