⛔️ Get what you want using reactance, the power of exceptional onboarding, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 31st edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Nudge, Lenny’s Podcast, and Builders Build.
What you need to know
⛔️ Get what you want using reactance
🔋 The power of exceptional onboarding
💸 The future of content is already here
BONUS segment
🙋♀️ Benefits of opinionated defaults
Remember the right for wrong action? These 7 readers cemented themselves in the Podup folklore for doing the right thing (referring a friend) for the wrong action (getting a shoutout in today’s newsletter). A big thank you to:
Sienna Reeves
Derren Donovan
Laibah Hopkins
Jay Bradshaw
Lucie Chan
Anton Padilla
Chester Weston
⛔️ Get what you want using reactance
🥉 Third place (3 min read vs 32 mins listening)
I’ve got another psychological phenomenon for you. Well, I don’t. Phill Agnew does. It’s called reactance. It’s yet another tool in our belt to get what we want by playing on human predictability.
What they say
What is reactance?
Reactance is the unpleasant feeling that all of us feel when something is taken away from us.
That could be a child crying when they can’t play with a certain toy or an adult complaining when they’re told to stop working from home and go to the office.
When people are told they can’t do something, a boomerang effect takes place and the forbidden activities become even more compelling and even more alluring.
Put simply, if you tell someone they can’t do something, they are far more motivated to do it. Researchers concluded that one way to increase an activity is to just censor it.
Phill Agnew
What I say
Why it matters: What would you say if I asked you to add this to your sales flow?
“Before our call, it's important you have watched the masterclass in full and run through the pre-call PDF and program overview, if neither of these have been completed we will cancel your call.”
You’d probably laugh in my face and tell me I’m crazy. Who threatens to cancel a customer call if they’ve not read your sales material beforehand?
Carl Parnell does exactly that. He uses reactance to say you can’t join his call unless you watch a video and read his pre-call PDF. Counter intuitively, this makes people want to join the call even more because of the prospect of being told no.
Reactance isn’t just one of those interesting things you read and disregard. You can apply reactance, or some form of it, in your own marketing, sales, customer service or product to get people to take the action that you want.
Between the lines: I’ve had a lot of fun trying out reactance with my 3 year old son. His obsession with Paw Patrol has got so bad I know every word of the theme song. So, I did what every bad parent does… I told him he can’t watch Toy Story.
Guess what he wanted to watch after I said that? You got it in one… Toy Story. My sanity is back and I got to try out reactance. Win win all around. Now it’s your turn to brush off your reverse psychology skills to get what you want in life and in business.
🔋 The power of exceptional onboarding
🥈 Second place (5 min read vs 1 hour 5 mins listening)
We’re quick to judge. You’ve got 0.05 seconds to make a good first impression with your website and a whopping 0.1 seconds before you’re judged on your appearance. Given the importance of onboarding on adoption and retention, you’d better make your first impression count.
What they say
The importance of onboarding
Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that 100% of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting 100% feature adoption of anything else in your product.
Onboarding is the first opportunity that you have as a company to deliver on the promise that you made in the marketplace.
I like to think of your brand as the promise that you’re making and the product experience as your delivery of that promise.
Those two things have to be aligned with each other or you’re going to have mismatched expectations.
This is the first chance that a customer has to be really excited or really disappointed so don’t mess that up.
It’s also the most motivated that someone is going to be about your product since they’re typically starting their onboarding journey with you at a time when they’re like ‘I need this thing really badly.’
Adam Fishman
How onboarding benefited Patreon
One of the things that onboarding really drives is habit formation with the product which leads to retention.
Churn is most likely to happen in the very earliest usage of your product. You want to get people past that hump.
At Patreon, we wanted to know when we should connect a creator with a human during the onboarding experience and the impact that has.
What we realised was connecting a creator with the right person at the right time would improve the first month of revenue that they made on the platform by 25%.
That mattered because the second month was a key input into a creator’s lifetime value.
That’s a really good example of the impact we had on creator earnings, retention and their overall success on the platform.
Adam Fishman
What I say
Why it matters: This is a lesson that can be applied throughout business. A memorable first impression can have a lasting impact on your business goals.
Improve your offer to acceptance rate. Copy Gusto and invite everyone who interviewed a candidate to the offer call to reinforce why they’re a fantastic fit and the impact they can make.
Improve your conversion rate. Personalize your website using Hyperise to make visitors feel like the solution is geared specifically to solving their needs.
Improve your retention rate. Send AI generated handwritten notes from the founder to customers to thank them for purchasing your product using Scribeless.
Have a think about areas where you’re regularly making a first impression and what you can do add a bit of showmanship.
Between the lines: As you know, I’m big on dogfooding the advice I share, so I’ve updated my welcome email to new subscribers. It now includes how to make the most out of this newsletter, a bit more about what to expect, and a link to my most recent Spotify playlist in case people are in need of an immediate podcast recommendation.
It took 10 minutes to update the email. That’ll be a pretty good ROI on time spent even if it helps improve retention by only 1%.
BONUS SEGMENT
🙋♀️ Benefits of opinionated defaults
At Patreon, high potential creators were siphoned off from the regular self-guided onboarding and put in the lap of a human being who could get them even more excited and start talking to them about the best things to do.
The productization of that, the best things to do, turned out to be one of our product principles called opinionated defaults.
This made it hard to do the wrong thing when you’re setting up your Patreon page and easy to do the right thing. But, we did not eliminate choice.
The creator could still make the choice to do the wrong thing. They could still set up a single tier pricing when we knew that a three-tired pricing model would work better for them.
We put more friction in place when they were trying to change the defaults because we had learned across a universe of creators what worked best.
At first, we learned this from human intervention. We then put the guardrails inside the product experience. This was a huge lever for us to drive the behavior that we wanted.
Adam Fishman
Amazon is a great example of customer choice done right. However, most companies aren’t a $1T e-commerce juggernaut offering all things to all people. Your business should probably limit choice and adopt Adam’s opinionated defaults approach.
I like to think of it like this… you’re the parent and your customer is the child. They might think they know what’s best for them, but you have the knowledge and experience that says otherwise.
💸 The future of content is already here
🥇 First place (3 min read vs 20 mins listening)
The world around us is changing. A few years ago, we viewed influencers as walking billboards. Now, creators are building their own businesses. It’s not unrealistic to think that they may overtake the very brands who funded their early fame.
MrBeast epitomizes this. He could easily pull an 8 figure sponsorship deal with McDonalds. Instead, he launched MrBeast Burger and is going head to head with the king of fast food. How does he win? He isn’t restricted to just burgers and fries. MrBeast can sell pretty much anything to his army of subscribers 106 million strong. He says it best:
“Once you know how to make a video go viral [...] you can practically make unlimited money”
What they say
Comparing MrBeast to the NFL
The Super Bowl gets like 100 million viewers every year. The average MrBeast video gets more than 50 million.
He’s probably not more valuable than the NFL today. Big picture, he will be. Absolutely.
Colin Landforce
Expanding on MrBeast’s businesses
The NFL has all of these teams. All of these players. There’s so many data points. There’s so many opportunities for revenue to be captured through that ecosystem.
This is where MrBeast is going. You have MrBeast Burger doing something like $50 million last year. It’s the number one ghost kitchen in the world. Now, they’re doing physical locations where you can go and eat at them.
He has Feastables which the old CEO of RXBARS is running. Who knows what he’s going to keep pushing out?
If you look at forward multiples, which is the way the entire world looks at valuing businesses, you would be an idiot to not see that MrBeast is going to be worth significantly more money in the future than he is today.
James Camp
What I say
Why it matters: David Friedberg had a similar view that traditional consumer brands will die in the next 30 years. Why? Because creators will eat their lunch. Take notice when lots of smart people start saying similar things. More often than not, they’re on to something.
We can all steal this simple recipe for success: (1) Build an audience, (2) Sell them products/services, (3) Repeat. Sure, most of us are starting on the bottom rung of the ladder. We just need more persistence and time before results come our way.
Between the lines: Need more persuading? Here are two more examples of the new creator model upending traditional business.
Liquid Death. Valued at $700 million, Liquid Death is dominating the canned water market with 70% market share. They launched without ever building the product. All they had was a video, fake product photos, and a Facebook page. This was enough to raise capital and build a content-first brand with 1.3 million Instagram followers. Compare this to Aquafina, the largest bottled water brand in the world, with 5,557 followers. The bottled water category is being turned on its head.
SERHANT. Studios. Ryan Serhant’s real estate company hit $1.45 billion in property sales last year and is on track to exceed $2 billion in 2022. The difference? Ryan hired a 30 person media team at SERHANT. Studios to sell to global buyers on social media.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
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Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.
Love some good reverse psychology!