The Vault Unlocked - Why Most Startups Fail to Scale (The Buyer Psychology Behind FOMO, Viral Growth, and Outrageous Startup Growth)

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Most founders think they have a product problem. Colin Hodge will tell you, on the record, that they don't. What separates the startups that go viral from the ones that don't is not the feature set, the funding, or the founder's hustle. It is psychology. The kind that gets engineered on purpose, measured against a number, and run as a system. Colin has spent twenty years building, selling, and buying back companies to prove it, and his book even hit the USA Today national bestseller list the morning of recording this episode. This is the conversation that explains why your growth is stuck, and it has nothing to do with working harder. Colin Hodge, author of Outrageous Startup Growth, breaks down the exact framework behind the startups everyone studies and nobody can replicate. He pulls apart how Clubhouse manufactured a citywide case of FOMO out of two invites, why Facebook's entire growth engine came down to one number most founders never bother to find, and how over 65 cognitive biases quietly decide whether a buyer says yes. Kayvon presses him on the line between influence and manipulation, and Colin draws it clearly: build for the customer's progress, or build a business that eventually collapses under its own tricks. Then it gets uncomfortable. They get into the data behind why negative, judgment-driven content outperforms anything positive, what that reveals about the people watching, and why the founders who understand this are the only ones who get to use it responsibly. This episode is for founders, operators, and product leaders who are done guessing. The ones who want growth they can repeat, not growth they got lucky with once. If you are looking for motivation, this is the wrong room. If you want the mechanics, sit down. Inside the conversation, Kayvon and Colin work through buyer psychology and behavioral science as the real engine of startup growth: how to create urgency without gimmicks, how to engineer customer decisions toward better outcomes, how to find the single magic moment that drives retention, and how to align an entire team behind one North Star metric. It is a working manual for anyone trying to scale a startup, sharpen their marketing, or sell with clarity in a market where attention is the only currency that matters. Topics covered: Why most startups stall and what actually unlocks scale The three-pillar growth framework: FOMO, decision engineering, magic moments The four ingredients of engineered FOMO, broken down with the Clubhouse playbook How to find your product's magic moment, the way Facebook found theirs Decision engineering and the cognitive biases that drive buyer behaviour The ethics line: customer success versus extraction Why negativity goes viral and what it says about all of us The North Star metric and how to align a team around it The wine list trick that exposes how pricing manipulates you every day Looking to dive deeper into these conversations and connect with our host and guest? Follow Colin Hodge  Instagram Facebook LinkedIn Website Buy Colin's Book: Outrageous Startup Growth Follow Kayvon: Instagram Facebook LinkedIn TikTok Want to go deeper with Kayvon? Subscribe to the newsletter Book a discovery call Get your Revenue Engine Scorecard™️ Hire the right salespeople  

You think the startups that win are smarter, better funded, luckier, but they're not. They win because they understand something you don't. My guest today is Colin Hodge. His new book just hit the USA Today bestseller list, and he is going to show you the psychology sitting underneath every product that takes off and everyone that goes quiet. We get into why Clubhouse exploded, why Slack locks an organization in at exactly 2,000 messages, and the one move at a wine list that exposes how every one. decision actually gets made. This is not theory. This is the operating system behind growth. The same

triggers being run on you right now. Let's unlock it. So Colin, welcome to the show. I just want to start off by saying, congratulations, man. Today's a big name for you. Thank you so much. Oh, it's a huge day. I just got the news. My book, Outrageous Startup Growth is on the national bestseller list for USA Today. So I'm officially a bestselling author and I'm so touched that, you know, the reviews are coming in. People are really, one, it's approachable. They're loving the writing, which feels so good. And then two, they're giving me like all the ways that they're, you know, it's sparking ideas and giving them insights into their own businesses. I mean, I can tell you right now for people listening, that's, there's no joke there.

I always say, there's no joke, you know, international bestseller, uh, writing your book. and I get to have you on the podcast. This wasn't planned and this happened today. So I get to sit here and we get to celebrate together with that. So again, I can only imagine the work, the years, everything you put into it to get that there today. Massive congratulations. So tell us a little bit about the book.

Tell us a little bit about Colin and how did this book come to be. Yeah. Thank you so much. So I've been an entrepreneur for about 20 years and I've always been. fascinated by psychology. You know, why do we make the decisions we make? Why do we like the brands we like and even choose the potential partners and friends that we choose? That got me started into the dating industry. And I, you know, I started exploring ideas there. I started my first company after leaving Microsoft. And what I realized was pretty quickly, I just wanted to have a bigger

impact. I wanted to run my own business. And, you know, the beginning of that journey was wild and raw and so naive in a lot of ways. But through starting my companies and growing them, selling them, buying them back, I realized that the fundamental piece that I was missing that I want to convey to other people is when you better understand your psychology as the founder and the psychology of users that you're trying to serve, then you can unlock massive success. I, we're going to go down that. Who wants to go down that road today? Because I'm excited about that, because that's a, that's a, it's a clear statement and it's a loaded statement. And there's a lot into that. But basically, if you can understand the psychology of yourself, aka your business,

which I would say is a mechanism in itself. And then that psychology creates an energy. throughout your people. So we're talking about a whole unit there of psychology and energy. And if you can understand that and how to understand who you're actually trying to serve, trying to help, trying to sell to, you can understand their energy and their psychology and you marry them together. That's the recipe for success. It absolutely is. And I noticed when I was looking around at, you know, we hear about the big startups getting the headlines and taking off, right? So I realized the The magic sauce, the ingredient that they have that made things either succeed and go viral or go splat was this fundamental understanding about how people make decisions and what attracts them to certain

products and services. So as an example, during COVID, you know, Clubhouse, the live audio app, that just completely blew up, took the world by storm. It was the hottest thing. Everybody was trying to get an invite. Everybody was trying to get into all the chat rooms. But I was, frankly, I have a confession, I was feeling quite jealous. I was like, how did they create this? You know, this alchemy out of nowhere. And when I realized that it wasn't magic, it was psychology, then I started to break it down. And I started to understand so that I could understand it better and apply it to my own startups.

And now anybody who listens to this and reads the book can apply it to theirs. So they created this virtuous cycle of FOMO, fear of missing out. And I can go into that if you want, but every startup that succeeds or fails is determined by this stuff. Wow. Okay. So you're saying this stuff, you know, and we're saying like psychology. And I mean, the spectrum of psychology is so wide and so deep. And we're still learning about it to this day.

So let's kind of narrow this down to a little bit of like the key indicators or the key aspects of what we or what you are defining psychology. And I'm going to say for today's sake, let's call it like psychology and business. Sure. But really, we know that a business is just a reflection of you. But let's just for it today, like psychology in business and knowing, hey, as a business, as a marketer, as a salesperson, trying to connect, trying to convert. Here are some fundamentals in psychology that are just must have. Like without these, it's already over. Don't even try.

Yeah, absolutely. So this whole field is vast. And the academic term is behavioral science. But I like to say user psychology because it's just a lot more down to earth than approachable. And I break it down into three main areas. So in my growth framework, the first one is FOMO. How do you create FOMO?

You need people to actually be motivated to try something or to take an action. And FOMO is a big pillar of that. The second one, and this is a very big area, but it's called decision engineering. Every decision that your customers need to make, you want to engineer the environment so that they're more likely to choose the best path for them that leads them toward progress, towards success with your product. And then lastly, magic moments. These are those moments where you match the user's mood, where they are in their journey

and in their life with some sort of interaction, some sort of opportunity for them to get vastly more success than they would have otherwise. So as an example of this, the classic examples are like Facebook. They found that their aha moment, their magic moment, was adding seven friends within seven days. That's when people, the value just clicks for people, right? And so I widened this a little bit. And I said, that's a big magic moment. That's like when it clicks for you.

But what about all these smaller ones when if we intervene as the product owners, as the founder, and we meet them in that mood, then we can really capitalize on whatever they're feeling there and make their success that much more likely. So as an example, when a user starts using your product, you are so motivated usually, right? Like the user is like, I'm ready to try something new. I'll put up with going through a sign-up process, all this stuff. there are so many things that you can try to intervene with in those high motivation early phases to try to get them onto a better path.

Maybe it means investing more in the sign-up process so they have a more complete profile, just something we do for our dating app, of course. But maybe if it's a SaaS product B2B, maybe at that point you want them to make sure that they are onboarding with the best information, the key information they need so that your AI or your product can better understand them and get them a result faster. So it's understanding these little magic moments. That's the third pillar. And I think all of these coming together, any founder, any marketer, any salesperson can

unlock a lot more growth and progress with their own stuff. It's interesting because there's so much information out there in marketing, copywriting, sales on, you know, on buyer psychology. And you, you've narrowed them down to three. fundamentals, I would say, because you wrote them in your book. So I'm going to say these are the three of all the different ones. These are the ones that are absolutely important, vital, I would say. You miss these. You kind of, you miss the mark. So when we go back to FOMO, I go, okay, that's pretty interesting. How does how, how did Clubhouse, I mean, create FOMO? To the point where

you can say it's FOMO, like you can say, hey, I'm only inviting so many people in, but there's a mechanism, there's an energy that has to take over where it actually starts working, where you, you even said, oh, you felt like, hey, how do I get in here? How is that engineered? Yeah. Love it. So, you know, we, we think about, most people think, oh, I have FOMO. You hear it, even still today, oh, I have FOMO, but they just, they just put, I say, like, they just put as a blanket word, meaning, I just, oh, I fear of missing out, right? But really, if we went deep, and this is where I love, like the deep psychology and this is, oh, you're feeling FOMO right now. Oh, realistically, it means you're feeling a sense of urgency or you're feeling, you're feeling like you're not part of some exclusive

group. Is that what's really happening? Or there's a little bit of scarcity happening. And that's why you're feeling this thing that we call FOMO. So marketers and businesses, they know how to tap into FOMO by creating these things. This reminds me a little bit of Childini. I'm sure if you know, Have you heard of the seven laws, right? Because two of them are right there, if not three of them are right there. So that's awesome. And then I like this one. I think this is the big one for me.

And I feel like there's a lot here as we go into the decision engineering. I mean, the title is what it is. Decision engineering is shaping the environment for better decisions for your customers. and I go through over 65 different cognitive biases and psychological levers that we can use to get them along the right way. Now, of course, I should say this. This stuff is powerful, right? So we want to engineer environments that help them make progress, not just frankly and shittify the product and get them stuck there. So I want to make sure there's an ethical angle to this that I talk about in the book.

But as we think about these 65 or I think I ended up. it up even higher influences. We think about things like the framing effect. So every decision we make, if we frame it with a, for instance, a price that is higher, then suddenly the lower priced item, it looks like a better deal. That's called anchoring. That's one of the framing effects. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. So all of these framing effects can really influence our decisions. The step in the sign up process that happens right before you ask. for push notification access, for instance, that influences if they say yes or no. So you want to frame their environment so that their decisions lead to a better outcome. And of course, I could go into many more, but I want to just say, like, part of decision engineering is understanding who they are and where they are in that moment.

So, you know, when they first using their product, what is their mood like? What are they, what is top of their mind in terms of why they're doing this? What are they motivated by, right? That helps you frame their decisions and engineer their environment for a better decision process. Oh, this 65, because that's, you know, there's quite a bit influences. Which ones do you find that are like the ones that you see that stick out the most or the ones that when you were looking down, you thought, wow, this really stuck out for me. This one's powerful. My favorites tend to be the ones that maybe are not quite so common, but are super powerful.

And so one of them, for instance, is the reciprocity principle. This is basically a quick definition is we, when we receive something as a gift, we feel a need to repay it in kind or even greater. And so companies that give us things for free in a kind way, we tend to want to stick around long. possibly make a purchase, et cetera. And it's one of the oldest tricks in the book. Apparently, there used to be, you know, basically a charity, charitable people who are collecting at airports. And they would hand people a flower. When they hand that flower, then they would say, you know, thank you so much for the flower, all that stuff. And you would feel like when they asked you for a donation, oh, yeah, sure, I'll give you a few dollars. So that is one of the oldest examples I was

able to find of using this. But in our products, we can use it, of course, with free features and stuff. But we can also do like, hey, you know, go out of your way with customer support, make them feel like they're special, like you hear them and they're part of that process. That's another form of reaching out and making the first gesture so that they want to reciprocate with more empathy for you in the company, with more investment in it, et cetera. And then there was the magic moments. We talked a little bit about that. But yeah, how you define that?

So I define minor magic moments. These are those smaller interventions that can really have outsized effect. There are the things like, you know, high motivation when a user first uses your product. Or I really like some of the negative ones. So if a user is frustrated, how do we intervene in that moment and give them an outlet for that to be heard and to turn that frustration into better progress. I run a dating app, so it's one of my successful startups. And one thing we do is, you know,

not everybody can get all the matches they want all the time right away. People want, you know, instant satisfaction and results, and that just isn't realistic. So in those moments of frustration, we try to intervene and say, for instance, hey, 90% of the men who have profiles like yours, they put more photos than you did. So let's get you on that path to more success.

I know you're frustrated. I hear that. Let's get you more successful. So that's a minor magic moment where we can find, conjure some magic in that mood in that moment that they're feeling. And then the second type is a major magic moment, also called an aha moment in some circles. This is when the value just clicks for people. They finally get, okay, this product makes sense for me. It's for me.

and I'm going to keep using it. It's when their retention, all those good metrics start to explode and really multiply. And then you get the long-term loyalty that you want. You'll get more usage, all that stuff. Referrals, all of it. Referrals, exactly. Yeah. So those are the one I mentioned about Facebook.

It's Slack. You know, Slack, they have one that is around the number of messages that an organization sends. And what happens? guess how many messages for any for a new organization guess how many messages they need to send before they hit their magic moment i i wouldn't even know because i i get on slack for five years and i i don't care i hate slack i hate it so and i i'm not a big fan either to be honest then i've been sending i guess yeah yeah but you're still there so that might be it um high retention for them they so they

found that organizations, once they send 2,000 messages collectively amongst their whole group, they are much more likely to be locked into a plan to stick around because they've already, maybe they've seen the value and the values really clicked for them, hey, this is easier than email, this is easier than whatever we came from beforehand. Or they just feel, hey, there's a lot of investment here in sunk costs, but we get the value of instant messaging and chat rooms here and all that stuff. It's so, it's interesting

because now we're going into something I think is very, very interesting to me because we're going deeper here. So Slack, and I love this. This is,

I love this. So Slack has realized with all their users and all that, they've done the science and they've realized that as soon as an organization reaches 2,000

messages, one way, two way, whatever it might be, the retention of keeping that organization on goes, let's just, go use the words,

goes through, roof, whatever it might be. It does. Yeah. So when we're talking, I think this is very important for people to hear this because I'm getting it. So when we're talking about magic moments, magic moments are moments, hey, in this case, Slack, organization needs to get to 2,000 messages. So then we work backwards and now they're in their in their rooms and going, okay, how do we get organizations to 2000, which I'm now thinking it's called, you called it magic moments. I would call it, uh, um, manufactured magic moments. Because really we're manufacturing these magic moments.

We're going, okay, what do we do? And then whatever, we don't know what it is they do, but whatever they do, the idea is, hey, how many people or how many messages need to happen? They're not. What do we do? Do we give them invites? Do we prompt them? Do we call the organization and say, hey, you're not using it?

I guess for me, it doesn't matter what or why they get to 2000. all that matters is they get there. Because for me, I hate it, for instance, but I got there because it's now become the norm. It's now become comfortable for me. It's where 99% of my clients are on. I don't really have a choice anymore, but I'm past that point of no return. Yeah, and I walk through in my book, how do you find your own magic moment just like this? I give a formula and steps for it.

For this, you know, for any goal, once you have an hypothesis, this is the metric we need to get our users to. Those ones are simple. Sometimes there are multiple steps. So not just 2,000 messages, but we also need, you know, three different chat rooms, stuff like that. So a little more of a journey versus just a single endpoint. That's fine. That works. And what I would encourage organizations to do once you have that hypothesis is then

go refer to the decision engineering tactics that I discuss and say, how can you nudge them in a positive way toward hitting those metric goals and then see if it actually does result in higher retention for those cohorts that hit it? Because when you do that, you're testing out your hypothesis and you might find some of the ways of nudging them there. Let's say you do something extreme like, hey, we're going to give you, we're going to pay your organization an extra 200 bucks if you hit 2,000 messages, you might find that the financial incentive inspires the wrong type of people and doesn't actually lead to that magic. It can't be manufactured in that way.

So you need to experiment with what are the nudges in their user journey to get them to actually see the magic versus just get them to that metric alone. And I would say this because I can hear some, I don't know why I felt there's like there might be people listening here going, uh, all right. how do I do that? I'm going to try to make it up on my own. And they're trying to think about their, their buyers like themselves. And I would say that's actually probably not the way to do that. Like the data doesn't lie. Emotions do. So in order to create this manufactured decision engineering, you got to, it's trial and error and actually watching and control in that trial and error and

and then seeing what's actually working. So it's quite the process. Yeah, you need to let the data drive because even the best behavioral scientists and, you know, experts in this field, they can't predict this stuff with high accuracy. They can get a better hit rate than just throwing stuff at the wall. Don't give me wrong. But you're still going to have to test it with real data and experiment. And that's part of the fun because we learn new things about how complex are,

decision environments are and the way that we actually move along a user journey, there are hundreds of influences that could derail them or get them on the right path. And a lot of them just come from their everyday lives. So, you know, a lot of people are using these products when they're distracted, when, you know, their kids or their spouse or, you know, something else is trying to grab their attention or they're not feeling well. So they only have two minutes and then they stop using it. All these different things are part of who they are as a person and understanding that psychology and what they're going through can really help you to keep nudging them along the right path. Yeah, it's interesting as I'm hearing you talk. I think to myself,

the businesses know this, right, and they're doing this. And we know the big corporations are doing this, let's just say, implementing psychological triggers and moments to allow or to have us consciously or unconsciously make decisions. Where else does that happen in the world? It's everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. And that's one of the crazy things that I realized writing this book is these psychological influences are in our everyday interactions.

When you go to the cafe, I give an example, but you basically notice there are dozens of these influences that determine whether the cafe is going to be popular, whether you are capturing all of the foot traffic well, whether people are ordering something quickly on the menu and keeping the line moving, how long the line is, all the pricing elements, the seating and the outline out, sorry, the structure of the cafe. So all this stuff is surrounding us. And being able to start to recognize them, you also become a little more immune to the influence. Now, not completely. I am still very susceptible to this stuff, but at least now I can recognize more often when somebody is trying to create that sense of urgency when I'm being nudged toward, you know, a lower value,

but higher priced item, stuff like that. I couldn't agree more when you're talking about that. I remember I had a friend who used to work with like P&G, right? Big, you know, and he, the schooling, he went, he told me he went like the school and he went through to learn this stuff. You can't, you can't even find it. Like, you were swore under sweet, like secrecy. Like when you walk down the drug aisle, you know, that's not, the things are not just there by chance.

Everything. You just said everything, the light, even we all know in grocery stores too, right? Like, that's what they say. Always shop on the outside of the grocery store, never in the middle, right? the middle is all the box food but that's designed for a reason there's a reason that you have bread in one corner and the meat and all the way in the other corner because you have to cross yeah higher place i just think it's so interesting because when i hear that right i go where do people learn this like how do how do the business owner how can we in our in our businesses

uh today implement this stuff uh go hire the experts so that we can learn this because we know it's there and we probably naturally do it as business owners, entrepreneurs, ourselves, without even knowing it because it's just kind of ingrained in us. But there is, there's an art to this. There's, like, what I can tell is like there's a deep understanding, a very deep understanding. That gets very complex because there's a lot of nuances. And what I love what you said was so true. Even this professional human behavioral scientists, they can predict a little bit better with a little more accuracy of what could happen, but they can't always predict 100% because you can't predict humans. Yeah, exactly.

We have so many different influences on our decisions, on our behavior that it's impossible to predict with 100% accuracy. So as we learn more and more of these psychological levers and cognitive biases and we start to shape their environment, we can nudge them. to a higher success rate, but we won't always get it right. I give an example in the book of an expert who is working with a product, and they said they ran about 20 experiments, and only one out of 20 was success. So that gives you an idea of like how hard some of this can be sometimes. Now, of course, there's always low hanging fruit in some areas. If you've never done any of this,

I could come in and work with somebody, and I could say, all right, I'm pretty sure we're going to have at least a 50% hit rate. It's not going to be 5%, 1 and 20. It's going to be like 50%. But just to give you an idea, like sometimes these things are so hard to control and so unpredictable, but where the value is, is you're not just randomly doing it and frantically copying what you see from competitors or chasing what the latest trends are. You're actually approaching it from a fundamental understanding of how do you do this and applying the next ones that are best for that area. And so I, I break down, I give a table about like, all right, if you want to do, if you want to optimize your pricing, here are the top five different effects that I suggest trying for that. Because I want people to

be able to reference this and be like, all right, I have a problem area, something I want to do better on. Here's where I start with that. And of course, you can always go deeper. But that's the starting point. Yeah, I love it. Like the basics. I'm not going to say one-on-one, but like, some of the starting points, basics, like, and this is all in your book right now. Yeah. So all in the book. And what I love about writing the book is I had to learn this stuff a lot more deeply because I had absorbed a lot of it, but I didn't know all the right labels for everything.

And so now to understand the label, understand better psychologically why that effect is working and not just do it from, you know, all the thousands of experiments I've run over the years, that was so illuminating because now I can have a framework and a language to say, all right, we're working on this new feature. Let's start to, let's apply these three things. I want to make sure that users are feeling like, you know, we've given them a gift and they want to reciprocate. Or I want them to feel a bit of fomo that this offer is going to go away soon, stuff like that. Or urgency or scarcity, yes.

Let me ask you this. As you're writing the book and you're, doing this deep study, what was a couple of things that scared you when you read it? Honestly, some of the scary stuff is how much of this you can recognize on social media right now. So social media is just full of all of these triggers. As an example, almost every viral video has some sort of curiosity hook. One of the common ones are open loops. So they'll open a loop about some topic, your mind naturally wants to close that loop and find out, you know, what information are you missing? And so you stick to it and you stay tuned. We see this even

in the basic stuff. One of the oldest elements of user design, user experience design is a progress bar. So progress bars are actually open loops. You know, it's partially filled. We have this desire to see completely filled. But social media is scary because they've gotten so good at fitting it to the specific triggers and types of content that are interesting to us as an individual, that it hooks us and we just keep watching and keep swiping and it knows, okay, it might not label it this way, but it knows, for instance, if you respond very well to open loops and teasing of information in the hook versus some sort of contrast or surprise effect in the beginning. Those are the sorts of things.

So social media is scary in those ways. And I hope that more and more of us can recognize these effects being used on us and maybe implement some self-controls, design our own environments to not be as addicted to things like social media that aren't always good for us to be on for hours on end. Yeah. You're talking about, not what this podcast is, but you are talking about something that's really important for me, especially because I even have kids and I look back and see how addicted I probably was on it. I think you get older, you realize it's not real, right? Like it's just, it's not real.

It's not. But you think it is, right? And you make it your whole world. But it's interesting because I have a social channel myself and everything I'm going to say, you're going to go, yep. But I think it's worth saying because it does. actually a live example and I have no problem saying it. So we run this again, a curiosity of hook. We have we have a format called the here's how you know format. So here's how you know somebody's in our sister. Here's how you know you're going to win. And we,

and I tested titles myself. I tested all these different titles and I started realizing and seeing something that actually scared me as a human race, made me realize, yeah, that's what psychology is. But it was like, damn, I wish it wasn't this way. So, what I found was if I said, here's how you know something negative. So if I said, here's how you know your negative, right, whatever it might be, wouldn't go viral because nobody wants to hear anything negative about themselves, right? If I said, here's how you know something positive, right? So here's how you know you're happy, right? That one, that one went pretty quite, you know, quite viral, but if I would

say, you know, here's how you know, you're ready for the next move. Here's how you know you're on your next step in life. Man, it went okay. But what went viral and it was scary and we've tested it is when I say, here's how you know somebody is hurting.

So it has to be able to somebody else and negative. Here's how you know somebody's a narcissist. Here's how you know they're going to lose everything. Instead of here's how you know you'll win, here's how you know somebody will lose, we'll go viral. That's a really interesting insight. And you're right.

It is a little scary because it says a lot about maybe our mindset, our natural openness to hearing about negativity from other people, but not ourselves. Or our mindset that I look at it is the mindset that people, and we know this, we're addicted to, like our brains are more addicted to negative. than positive. That we know. I mean, I should say we know it's read a couple marketing books and you'll learn that pretty quickly. But then it goes to a deeper level. It's one thing about being addicted to negative. It's it's being happy or wanting to watch or or spending more time watching someone else suffer than even yourself win. That's where I go, we got we got a problem in this world. There is

there is a psychology problem and and and you said it best like social media is not helping that. So as you went through your research, where it is the research that says that we can turn this around, where is the positive side of this research that says, hey, you know, and I love what you said, this stuff is powerful. This stuff is very powerful. And those psychopaths, I'll call them what they are, who understand these, the stuff at a deep level and know how to manipulate people and use these for their own personal gain, which happens every single day, it's scary.

How can people use this for the good and for the impact and actually be able to change people's lives instead of just take, take, take, take? Yeah, a key approach that I encourage and we try to use is it is powerful, but if you're helping your customers along to some level of success, you're focused on their success, not your business success, then you're doing it in an ethical way. Now, you need to have the Cajonis to align those two things and say, we don't put profits first above customer success, but I really feel that the most sustainable, long-lasting, and valuable companies

are those that focused or refocus at some point on the customer's success and making them happy in some cases, but at least, better off, leaving them better off than when they started. And so that's the ethical way that I encourage people to do it. And as long as they're making progress toward that, then you can use lots of other nudges to do that. And I find one of the biggest impactful ways to do this is to actually, you know, you can do net promoter scores, you can do that. But you want to find what is your North Star metric and for that user success. And you want to be measuring is what we're doing. And you're doing. actually increasing that. Are we getting on a better path for those users?

I love what you just said, the North Star metric. For those for businesses or people listening that don't understand that, what does that mean the North Star metric? That is the most important metric that your whole team can look up to just like the North Star in the sky and use it as guidance of the company's success and the direction that you're trying to. trying to get your customers to. So for some companies, this might, we run a dating app, right? So for us, we do this with back and forth conversations people have within their matches. And so that's our value, our measurement of the value we're giving our customers.

And as we consider things like we run a new AB test and for turning off a feature or adding a new feature, how does it affect that metric? That's what we're looking at. But every sort of business can have different ones. And you can change the North Star metric as your business changes or as your priorities change. But you definitely want to align everybody. It's the best measurement of the most important aspect or action that's going on with your product. Interesting.

Because just when you're talking, you said a couple times you're running this data app. And I thought right away, I was like, oh, the metric I would assume would be how many matches or how many people go. got married or something like that. But yours is X amount of conversations back and forth because what I learned from you earlier today, that is the magic moment. Is that what I'm hearing? You guys figured out your magic moment is when a couple or two people exchange back and forth conversations.

So I'm not going to ask because obviously it's probably IP, but we know as soon as people, two people have X amount of conversations back and forth. We've created a magic moment where they're going to stay. Likelihood is staying on the app, which means the likelihood of them connecting with more people and the likelihood of them actually getting married. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we're a casual dating app, so we don't tend to measure for marriages that happen. They do happen from our user base, but that's not our top goal.

So yeah, we do measure with the conversations. back and forth. At some point, we did just try to optimize simply matches, right? And that is important. It's a preliminary step to the later North Star metric that we're using here. But at some point, you realize that's not enough, right? A match without a conversation is not very valuable. It's more valuable than getting zero matches, but it's not very valuable.

And so we wanted to keep evolving this. And like all of the stuff in user psychology, it's an evolving field and your product is going to evolve. And so right now, I could take a look at our own marketing or our own product. And I can probably find dozens of things that I would say, that's probably an area that is ripe for improvement. We could try to run another experiment here. So this stuff is never finished. But the beauty of it is when you're always growing, you're always improving stuff, then you can still keep coming back to this well of user psychology because it's so deep and so rich

with potential. I love it. As we come to an end here, I mean, I definitely want to get the book. Where can people find your book? You can find the book anywhere. It's on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, bookshop.org. It's in some local bookstores. And I, you know, you can find it on my website, Colin Hodge.com. And I want to leave with one extra bonus tip. if you don't mind. I was going to ask you, what is one last, I was. I'm going to say if, what's the one last thing that we need to know either about psychology, business, connection, whatever it might be.

This is a fun one. So this is a good tip. If you're ever going out to a restaurant or a wine bar and you're with a, you're on a date or you're in a group, they want you to buy a specific bottle. And so the number one mistake to avoid is never buy the second cheapest bottle. of wine. The reason is they price that to try to, they use anchor pricing. And so they have a higher anchor price and the cheapest bottle, which is the lowest anchor. And they make that second cheapest bottle appear like it's a reasonable compromise value. But it's not. You know, their markup on that is

much higher. And you're getting about the same quality usually as the cheapest bottle. So avoid that second cheapest bottle and go for the one higher or the cheapest bottle because they know we're all scared of looking like cheap skates. Okay. Oh, we're going to stay here for a second because that's interesting because I want to know that. I'm more interested in that psychological trigger of what's the fear because I know there's a psychological term for sure the fear of the fear of looking cheap, but that's attached to something even deeper. So I just want to make sure people understand this. You're ever got the restaurant and you're opening that that wine list. If you want to look cheap, go to the first one. Don't buy this. I'm going to probably say

the second or the third one because they're going to be the same comparable wines or whatever it is of the first one. But it's okay to go to five, six, seven, eight. Exactly. Yeah. And I talk about in the book, I label all of the, on the sample wine menu, I label the effects they're using and how they're affecting your your decision process. So, you know, that compromise effect is very powerful. And we're avoiding the identity hit, the ego hit that we would take in that judgment as a cheap skate if we're on a date or in a group. So that's the fear is fear of judgment, fear of, well, frankly, having an unsuccessful date, whatever it is. Yeah. No, I think you're just saying fear of judgment or the fear of looking bad, which then becomes an internal

psychological trigger of something that's happened in the past because people don't want to feel bad or they don't want to feel or not look good or look cheap, whatever that might be. So we'll go for the second. I'll go for the third. It's funny because I think I've heard this and I probably still buy the second or third bottle sometimes.

So it's interesting. It works. It works. Well, Colin, I love it. For any of those that want the book, they will definitely be in the show notes and it's definitely going to be on YouTube. So again, we started it off with this,

and I'm going to end it with this because I think there's no joke here. Congratulations. To get a book, international bestseller is no joke. It's a huge accomplishment. And to be part of that today, I think is awesome. And I can't wait. And I'm going to tell everyone, you probably need to go read this book. If you're in marketing, you're in sales, you just want to even learn how and what's happening

in the world and how it's being used against you. This is a defense mechanism. This is a defense book for you to protect yourself, to protect your own happiness. Get the book. Colin, welcome again. And thank you so much. And I can't wait to see where this goes. Thank you so much for having me.

This was really fun. Cheers.