Hey everyone!

We keep building our guide to referral programs, and this is the one I've been most excited to write.

Where we've been so far:

Why reward doesn’t matter that much

When to ask

Who to ask

Aaand, today we will talk about how to ask, without even asking.

Almost every referral program is built around what the referrer gets. Credits, cash, a discount, something for them and something for their friend. That's fine, it works, nobody's mad about free credits.

The problem is that the reward isn't what makes someone want to recommend you. Nobody wants to feel like they're running ads for your product in their group chat. What people will happily share is something they'd send anyway that happens to have your product inside it.

Some products are built to hand people exactly that. I'll be honest about who can pull it off and who can't by the end. Let's dive in.

submit a product you are curious about

THE FIND

I was clicking through Amplitude's template gallery this week. Amplitude is product analytics (you know it) that I ADORE, and their gallery is full of ready-made dashboards you can drop into your own account.

Here's what I always loved: many dashboards have a real person's name and face on them.

These are built by known product and growth people, and each one is credited to its creator. Amplitude obviously reached out to them, but look at what they offered instead of a referral link. A format that lets these people showcase their own expertise. The creator gets a polished artifact with their name on it that makes them look sharp to their audience. Amplitude gets a dashboard that only works once you're inside Amplitude.

Nobody here is running a "sign up with my code" campaign. They're publishing something that makes them look good, and the product is baked into it. It is a referral program, hidden inside the affiliate / advocate / endorsement / partnership / whatever you call it campaign.

Canva does the same thing at scale with its Canvassador program, and Miro has their famous Miroverse.

Does the thing your users would share make them look good, or does it just make you look good?

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PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND

People share what makes them look smart (like this issue, for example). That's the whole engine, and there's solid research under it.

Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman went through around 7,000 New York Times articles over three months to see what landed on the "most emailed" list. One of the strongest predictors: content that made the sharer look good to send. Useful, surprising, impressive. We forward the things that reflect well on us, and skip the things that don't.

So the format matters more than the reward. Anyone who's done sales knows you open with value, not with a pitch about yourself. A credited dashboard is value first, something the other person actually wants in their hands. A "20% off with my code" is a pitch, and you're handing it to a friend to deliver for you.

The discount has a second problem. It only moves people who were already circling your product, the ones who are problem-aware, solution-aware, and weighing the buy. For them it's the final nudge that gets them over the line (cool). For a cold person who's never heard of you, it's noise, because there's no trust yet for a discount to land on (not so cool).

A referral exists to reach exactly those cold people, which makes it an onboarding problem more than a rewards problem. Someone who arrives through a shared artifact is a brand-new user who happened to come in through a friend, and you onboard them the way you onboard anyone: value first, offer later.

THE PLAYBOOK

When it works:

Your product makes something a user would be proud to put their name on. A design, a dashboard, a template, a teardown, a report. Ideally, it’s not only shareable, but reusable. If that's you, this is the strongest referral loop you'll ever build, and most teams sit on it without noticing.

How to use it:

1. Put the creator's name on it.

Duh, right? But let’s not ignore it. Attribution is the whole difference between "here's a template" and "here's this person's template."

2. Make sure the artifact means something in the sharer's world.

For example, a Miro template is valuable for Product / Project managers and useless for a lot of people who don’t work in digital. Same targeting logic as the earlier issues: you want people whose audience actually cares about this thing. I know it sounds boring, but you do have to know your ICP.

3. Build the signup into using it, not next to it.

Cloning the dashboard puts you in Amplitude. Opening the design puts you in Canva. If your creator shares a PDF with a "sign up here" button at the bottom, you've split the value from the product and dropped the person back into salesman mode.

When it backfires:

Be honest about your product.

If it makes no shareable artifact but people use it together, run the loop through team invites instead, where the payoff is getting your actual team in, so the thing finally works.

If it's not collaborative either, you're down to external branding: "powered by," a badge, some swag. That's not the most high-performing tier, unless your UI is one of the strongest competitive advantages (like in fashion) or you have truly massive regular exposure to a new audience.

Not every product is built to go viral, and it's better to know which one you are than to run a creator program nobody would sign their name to.

If you forget everything, remember this:

People share what makes them look good, not what makes you look good. Build your referral so that using your product is the thing that makes them look good, put their name on it, and you stop asking for referrals and start collecting them.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

Part 1 said the reward matters less than you think.

Part 2 said timing the ask beats sweetening it.

This is the one people skip and then wonder why nothing converts: you can only get an invite out of someone who actually has a person to invite. Duh.

Sounds obvious. Then you watch how these prompts usually get built, and it's "invite your whole team" fired at everyone who signs up, including the solo freelancer who's never had a team and never will. No reward and no timing trick fixes an empty room. There's just nobody on the other end of the ask.

Btw, don’t ignore this 👇

submit a product you are curious about

THE FIND

I was in Canva's team settings this week. Big product, most companies already have a login floating around somewhere.

What got my attention wasn't the invite prompt itself. It was who Canva decided to show it to, and why.

Canva looked at who I'd been sharing designs with and used that as the tell. I've been sending work to specific people, so it figures, correctly, that I've got people worth inviting, and it puts them right in front of me. If I'd never shared a thing with anyone, there'd be nobody to suggest, and the whole prompt would mean something different.

So, for your own product: when you push someone to invite their team, what tells you they've got one?

PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND

A prompt can't create willingness. It can only collect on willingness that's already there. And the clearest sign someone's willing to invite a coworker is that they're already behaving like they have one.

In 1966, Freedman and Fraser ran a study that's now in every persuasion textbook. They asked homeowners to put a big, ugly "Drive Carefully" billboard on their front lawn. Asked cold, fewer than one in five agreed. But when the researchers first asked for something small, sticking a little safe-driving sign in the window, then came back later with the billboard, agreement jumped past half. Same big request. The difference was one small step taken beforehand.

Sharing a design is that small step. Someone who's been sending work to a coworker has already pulled that person into how they use Canva. Asking them to make it official is just the next move for someone already headed that way. The user who's shared nothing is the homeowner asked cold, and no prompt talks them into a team they don't have.

The invite is how a free user turns into a paid team. Aim it at the people whose behavior already points to one, and the same prompt starts turning into seats.

THE PLAYBOOK

When to keep it in mind:

Any product that can see collaborative behavior. If you can track people sharing files, receiving comments, being added to something, you can read who's working with others and prompt off it. Whether someone has a team of two or two hundred doesn't matter, the behavior is what tells you they've got someone. In this case, this loop is quite often about the revenue expansion and engagement, not about acquiring new users (unless people can interact without signing up).

How to use it:

1. Find the behavior that points at someone not yet on the account.

Canva reads sharing. Find the action that means a user is working with someone outside their current team, sharing a design, a comment, a co-edit, then prompt off that instead of signup date. The target doesn't have to be new to the product. A free user or someone on another team is exactly who you want, because the win is expansion onto a paid team, not net-new signup necessarily.

2. Name the person, and say why.

The signal tells you who: the person on the other end of that share. Show them, and give the reason, "you already share designs with this person." Back in Part 2 I called every invite a reputation bet. That line shrinks the bet, because they've watched you use it already.

3. Match the push to the strength of the signal.

A recent, repeated share is a confident signal, lead with that name. A single old one is weak, ease off. Prompting a shaky signal as hard as a sure one is how you land on "invite your ex-manager" and lose trust you won't get back.

When it backfires:

Sensitive domains. If your product touches legal, health, HR, anything where who someone works with is confidential, surfacing collaborators exposes relationships the user never meant to show. Skip the auto-suggestions there and let people type.

If you forget everything, remember this:

An invite prompt can't manufacture someone to invite. It only pays off with users who already have one, and you find them by watching what they do in your product, and then acquiring more people like them at the top of the funnel.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

Last week I argued that wanting has to come first, that no reward makes someone recommend a product they don't already love. A few of you replied, and one of you asked me to break down Magic Patterns' entire upgrade motion, which I'll do properly over the summer because there's a lot in there.

Today I'm staying on referrals and pulling out one small thing they get right: how you ask the people who already love you. As always, comment on Beehiiv, mention @Anastasia Kudrow for discussions on LinkedIn, or just hit reply.

Btw, don’t ignore this 👇

submit a product you are curious about

THE FIND

Magic Patterns is an AI design tool. You describe a screen or a flow, it generates real, working UI you can hand straight to engineers, and every generation spends credits. Go deep on a project and you burn through them fast (I’ve been there).

I use it constantly with clients. I'm not a designer, but I know what good looks like, and this lets me show it, an interactive version of the thing in my head, before it ever reaches a real design or dev review. Yesterday I was mid-task, burning through credits, getting close to my limit. Then I saw this.

It didn’t hit at the moment when my credits went dry; that was a place for a classic upgrade trigger. But this one showed up right when I was experiencing value, without being threatened by a potential usage block.

Most tools bury the referral link in a settings page nobody opens. Magic Patterns puts it on top of the editor, at the exact moment I need more credits, and the reward is credits, the thing I'm burning through, not a ten-dollar gift card I'd forget by lunch.

Then they fire the same offer again, the second I want to share a project with a teammate (again, a clear value indicator).

PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND

Wanting to do something and actually doing it are further apart than they look. The gap usually gets closed by something small: a prompt that shows up at the right moment and makes acting easy right now.

Psychologists call that a channel factor. The clearest study is Leventhal, Singer, and Jones, back in 1965. They handed Yale students a frightening pamphlet about tetanus. The students came away more scared and said they meant to get vaccinated, but almost none did, around 3%. A second group got the same pamphlet plus a campus map with the clinic circled and its hours. Vaccinations jumped past 30%, roughly a tenfold difference. Same fear, same stated intent, but the map did the work.

But the map only helps once the wanting is already there, so the real question is when that wanting shows up. A team invite is still a social bet: you're telling coworkers this tool is worth their time, and your name is on it. How early you'll make that bet depends on the risk.

When the product is a familiar category, or something the team has no real choice but to adopt, the risk is low and people invite from the first screen.

Push them toward yet another unproven tool and you're the one who dragged everyone in, which is exactly the social suicide nobody commits on faith. They want a happy moment first, proof it works, before they'll put their name on it.

THE PLAYBOOK

When to keep it in mind:

You can point to a moment where a user clearly succeeds: an output they came for, a result they can see, or a stretch of heavy, invested use. Workspace and credit- or seat-based products get the most from this, because the person you invite lands inside your account and becomes another seat.

How to use it:

1. Trigger on a result.

The strongest moment to ask is right after someone gets the thing they came for, a finished prototype, an exported file, the first report that actually works. They have proof in hand, and they're willing to put their name next to it. Ask here and the referral brings in someone with the same problem, the highest-fit user you'll ever get. It can depend on how complex your motion is and if one person can achieve any result without the team, of course. Which brings me to the second point.

2. Trigger on deep engagement.

Not every product has a single finish line. Some just get used, hard. The person on their fifteenth iteration, or the one burning through credits, is telling you they're invested, and that's its own signal of willingness. Fire there, and let the reward pay off the moment: Magic Patterns offers credits right as you're running out, so the ask reads as help rather than a pitch.

3. Stay inside the flow.

A success moment is fragile. Interrupt it with a modal that stops the user cold and you've turned a good feeling into friction. Keep the trigger next to the work, a small banner over the editor, an inline nudge on the screen they're already on, something they can act on or wave off without losing their place.

When it backfires:

Don’t reach out to those who experience problems with your product. To them, it will seem borderline offensive even if the offer is good.

If you forget everything, remember this:

We don’t need an additional trigger to share negative feedback. But we do need that one tap to share something that we love because otherwise, we just take it for granted.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

I want to spend the next few issues on referral programs, because I don't know a single team that hasn't struggled with one. They're a pain to build, the math gets risky fast, and after all the cash you hand out, referrals still tend to land as some embarrassingly small line on your revenue.

And yet everyone keeps building them, because when they actually work, it’s magic.

So I want to take them apart properly.

If there's a referral question that's been bugging you, drop it in the comments or just hit reply, and I'll work the good ones into the series.

Today, let’s start with the question underneath all the others: why won't people share?

The incentive isn't the engine

Most referral programs are built on a weird assumption: that people will harass their friends and colleagues, and look like a sleazy salesman doing it, all for ten dollars. They won't. The money was never going to be the reason, so when nobody shares, making the reward bigger almost never fixes it.

Think about what you're actually asking for.

Go to someone whose opinion of you matters and vouch for a product. That's a bet on your own reputation. When researchers look at why people recommend things at all, money sits near the bottom of the list.

We do it to help someone we like, and to look good doing it (!), to be the one who knew about the good thing first, yes, it’s all about ego, everyone has one. The trigger is internal, and a reward can't manufacture it.

I see this from the other side all the time. I don't pay anyone to recommend Ghosted, so every time someone does it anyway, with nothing in it for them, it makes my whole day. But of course, I’ll come, like, and comment on it haha

Wait… are incentives useless?

Not really, even though we all could use a hot take for LinkedIn that something is dead again, right?

Seriously though, a referral program can absolutely have incentives, and a good one helps. You just have to be honest about the job it's doing.

But here’s the thing: the incentive doesn't make someone want to recommend you.

It lowers the friction once they already do. It's the nudge that gets a willing person to act today instead of next week, the little push to finally send the link they were already half-thinking about. It gives them a reason to do it now, and a reason to do it again. That's a real job, and it's worth designing well. It's just not the heavy lifting.

The wanting comes first, and the incentive rides on top of it. When the wanting isn't there, the incentive has nothing to work with, and it sits unused no matter how big you make it.

So the real question was never how much to pay (even though a “too small” cash incentive can absolutely hurt your flow). The real question is whether you've created the conditions where someone wants to share at all.

Okay, how to create those?

A referral only happens when a few things line up, and when they don't, no reward buys your way out.

1.The person has to actually love the product.

Not just "activated," but uses it and would be annoyed if it disappeared tomorrow. You can't vouch for something you've barely touched, and people won't. This is why emailing your whole user base a referral offer does so little. Most of them have nothing to vouch for yet, and a bigger reward won't hand them conviction they don't have.

2.They also have to know someone with the same problem.

Teams skip this one completely. A recommendation only makes sense between two people who share a need, the same job, the same headache, the same kind of work. If your user is a freelance designer, their referral is worth something to another freelance designer and nothing to their cousin who sells insurance. So your program leans on whether your best users run in circles full of more potential best users. When referrals stay flat, it's often not the reward, but the problem of who you are targeting (yes, at the very top of the funnel). Do they even have anyone to share it with?

3.And the ask has to make them look good, not you.

The second your program makes someone feel like your unpaid sales rep, you lose the exact people you wanted. Dropbox got this right, and we all can’t stop talking about it. Their referral line wasn't "earn by sharing," it was "get more space." Same action, but one makes the user your salesman and the other makes them someone getting more value from the product they already love and sharing the same with a friend.

But even when those are in place, you can fail, if…

… you simply forget to inform me that this opportunity exists. Sorry for this official tone, but I really wanted to highlight how serious this dumb problem is.

We ran a regular research with one of my clients to figure out why our referral program didn’t perform as well as we’d like. We bet that the offer wasn’t good enough. Turned out, 60%+ of users never even heard about it.

Placement does more work here than the size of the reward, especially if you have a high-volume product.

A referral link tucked in a settings menu gets close to zero use; the same link on the main screen gets 30%+. One Shopify brand tested it and watched participation climb from 0.8% with a footer link, to 4.2% with a dashboard embed, to 11.7% with an in-product prompt that fired at the right moment. That's a 14x swing from placement and timing alone, before you touch the reward.

So, two things:

Where it lives: put it in the path people already walk, the dashboard, the onboarding flow, the screen they land on after they get a result. Don’t make it annoying but make it present.

And when it fires: ask right after a win, not at signup before they've felt anything. The moment someone finishes a project, sends the first invoice, hits the result they came for, that's when they feel good about you and will actually pass it on.

3 things to make people want to share your product

1. Pick the segment before the reward.

Start with people who love the product and know others with the same problem. If those two things aren't true, no incentive saves you, because you're paying people to do something they have no reason to do.

2. Make it visible at the moment of value.

Put the ask in the path they already walk, and trigger it right after a win. A referral link nobody sees is the most common reason a program looks dead, and no reward fixes a link nobody finds.

3. Treat the reward as a nudge, not the main point.

It smooths a trigger that's already there, but a great experience and product adoption must come first. So when referrals are flat, don't reach for a bigger number. Go back and check the conditions and the placement first.

If you forget everything, remember this:

You can't pay someone enough to feel good about selling out their friends. If users don’t share your product, look into segmentation, exposure, and overall client satisfaction. If those components don’t work, a bigger offer won't change it.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

I was on a call with a founder the other day. Users were struggling with activation, free-to-paid conversion was low, and we were going through what to do about it.

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, they stopped me and said: "So basically, you're telling us we built a really smart product and now you want us to dumb it down."

I said yes.

And I've been thinking about that ever since, because they sounded offended. Like I was asking them to undo the best thing about what they'd built. But the more I sit with it, the more I think this is one of the most common traps in product: the team builds something genuinely sophisticated, genuinely powerful, and then can't figure out why users bounce off it like it's a brick wall.

So let me say it plainly: dumb products win. They win on activation. They win on conversion. They win on retention. Users are human, and humans gravitate toward things that feel easy because they make them feel smart.

No one wants to feel stupid

Your product doesn't exist in a vacuum. You know this intellectually, but it's worth saying out loud because it changes how you should think about everything you build.

The value of your product isn't what's on your feature list. It's what your users perceive. And perception is an emotional process first.

When someone opens your product and immediately gets what it does, finds the thing they need, and gets a result, they feel smart. That feeling attaches to your product. "This tool is great" is really "this tool made me feel competent," and competent feels good. There's a psych concept for this called processing fluency. When information is easy to process, we rate it as more trustworthy, more valuable, more appealing. We don't evaluate the information more carefully and then decide it's good. We feel the ease, and the ease becomes the evaluation.

But someone opens your product, sees seventeen options, isn't sure where to start, clicks something that opens a settings panel they weren't looking for, and now they're two layers deep in a UI they don't understand. They feel lost. That feeling also attaches to your product. And once it does, your feature list is irrelevant. I don't care that you have AI-powered workflows and 200 integrations. I feel dumb right now, and I want to close this tab.

This is the thing founders miss. The user is evaluating how the product makes them feel in the first minutes. And if that feeling is confusion, it doesn't matter what comes after.

What "dumb" actually means

I'm not talking about building something simple or stripped down or easy to clone. You can be incredibly sophisticated under the hood. The dumb part is the surface.

Three things make a product feel dumb in the right way:

The value is undeniable and easy to describe.

If your user can't explain what your product does in one sentence to a friend, you have a clarity problem that no feature can fix. "It automates my workflows" is fine. "It's an AI-powered cross-functional operational efficiency platform" is a product that's about to get ghosted.

The next step is painfully obvious.

At every point in the experience, I should know what to do next without thinking about it. Not "figure out which of these three paths applies to me." Not "read the tooltip to understand what this button does." The action should be so obvious it feels almost insulting. That's the target.

The interaction doesn't feel like homework.

If using your product for the first time feels like working through a thirty-page workbook, you've lost. It doesn't matter that the workbook is well-designed. Cognitive load is cognitive load. The brain doesn't distinguish between "this is hard because it's confusing" and "this is hard because there's a lot of it." Both feel like effort, and effort triggers avoidance.

Why we ignore the clever product

Here's where it gets interesting for anyone doing PLG.

You'd think that if you offered someone a full-featured product and a stripped-down demo, they'd pick the full version every time. More is more, right?

They don't. And it's consistent.

When you give someone access to everything, every feature, every setting, every workflow, you're also handing them a decision problem. What do I use first? What matters? What can I ignore? Every option is a tiny cognitive tax, and those taxes add up fast. The psych term is choice overload, and it doesn't just reduce satisfaction. It reduces action. People stare at the all-you-can-eat buffet and walk away hungry.

The limited version, the demo, the guided free tier, the "dumb" version with three features, removes all of that. Fewer decisions to make. The path is clear. And because the path is clear, the user actually walks it, gets a result, and now they have a real reason to upgrade based on something they experienced.

Self-efficacy matters here too. People don't just need to believe your product is valuable. They need to believe they personally can get value from it. A complex product with a steep learning curve quietly signals: you might not be able to pull this off. A dumb product says you got this. Look, you already did the thing.

That confidence is what drives upgrades. The quiet, internal belief that "I can use this and get what I need."

The sophistication trap

The founder I talked to wasn't wrong about their product being smart. It probably is. Most products that struggle with conversion aren't bad. They just make perfect sense to the people who built them and almost no sense to anyone else.

You built it, so the interface makes perfect sense to you. You know why that dropdown exists. You know what "configure workspace" means. You know that the three-step setup is actually fast once you understand the mental model. But your user doesn't have your mental model. They have forty seconds of attention and a vague sense of what they came here to do.

Building the dumb version means closing the gap between what you know about your product and what a first-time user can absorb in a single sitting. The sophistication can live underneath. Nobody's asking you to delete features. Just stop making every feature visible at once.

If you forget everything, remember this:

Dumb products make their users feel smart. Clever products make their tech team feel smart. Who are you building for?

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

But people are finally starting to talk about what comes after: the habit.

I think it's about time, because activation doesn't always bring you upgrades. Habit and long-term engagement do. And I see this constantly with my clients. This week was a perfect example: a client with a very strong top of funnel. Dedicated, curious audience that was actively looking for guidance. Barely anyone came back after the first session. Barely anyone upgraded without a demo.

The early value wasn't great either, but that wasn't the main problem. The main problem was habit building. Introducing the core features. Getting people to actually adopt them. This is one of the biggest challenges I see, especially with more complex B2B tools.

How do you form a habit that drives long-term revenue? And why are the rules so different from how we work with activation?

Want to read issues that solve your current challenges? 👇

submit a product you are curious about

The Find

I heavily use Magic Patterns. I honestly think it's the most convenient product for collaborative design and prototyping, especially for consultants who work across multiple client projects.

The other day when I opened the product, I saw this:

A suggestion to create a design system, with free credits gifted to me to accomplish this task.

Here's why I think this is genius for habit formation.

1. It specifically prompts an activated user to do a task that will signify a bigger commitment, improve the overall quality of their results, and create a sense of ownership over what they've built.

2. On top of that, it reduces the barrier. Creating a design system sounds like homework, but Magic Patterns invested in me so I could do it. Free credits, on them. Just go and do it, you will benefit from it, and the product will benefit from it too.

Now, I can see how this contradicts the activation logic that many people use. When we think about activation, we're trying to cut as much as we can. Reduce the number of steps, postpone the most complicated tasks. But big results don't come from small moves. You have to invest to actually feel dedicated. And when it comes to habit, it does make sense to onboard users into heavier use cases that contribute to long-term engagement and the overall experience from the product.

Why it works: psychology behind

Think about the last product you kept coming back to. The one where, at some point, you built something inside it. You uploaded your data. You configured your workspace. You set up templates that saved you time every week. You committed. 

Now think about whether you'd switch to a competitor. Probably not. And the reason isn't that the competitor is worse. It's that you already put work in. You'd have to redo all of it. That feeling of "I've already invested too much to leave" is doing more for your retention than any activation flow ever could.

Norton, Mochon, and Ariely studied this in 2012. They had people assemble IKEA boxes, fold origami, and build Lego sets. Participants consistently overvalued their own creations, rating their wobbly origami cranes nearly as high as expert-made ones. The researchers called it the IKEA effect: when you put labor into something, you value it more. You probably know that.

But there's a critical boundary condition. 

The effect only kicked in when participants successfully completed the task. When they built something and then had to destroy it, or couldn't finish, the increased valuation disappeared entirely.

This is exactly what Magic Patterns is engineering. 

A design system is meaningful labor. You're importing your brand, your components, your typography. When you finish, you've built something inside the product that's yours. You value it. You don't want to walk away from it.

Nir Eyal calls this the investment phase, the most overlooked step in his Hook Model. Users put something into the product that stores value for future use. Data, content, configurations. The more you invest, the more the product appreciates for you specifically, and the harder it becomes to switch. Your design system now lives in Magic Patterns. Every future generation matches your brand. Leaving would mean rebuilding all of that somewhere else.

The free credits solve the boundary condition problem. Creating a design system sounds like homework. Credits reframe it from "work you should probably do" to "a gift you'd be silly to waste." 

The Playbook

When to keep it in mind:

This move is for users who've already gotten some value from your product. They've used it, they've seen what it can do. If your setup and even activation look reasonable, but there are barely any self-serve upgrades after the trial, this is for you.

How to use it:

1. Find the investment action that raises switching costs.

Look for the task that, once completed, makes your product personalized in a way that's painful to replicate elsewhere. For Magic Patterns, it's the design system. For a project management tool, it could be importing your team's workflow templates. For an analytics platform, setting up custom dashboards / integrating with Slack or Notion. The key is that the action should produce something the user will reference repeatedly.

2. Subsidize the effort.

This is where most products fail. They know the deeper feature exists. They even nudge users toward it. But they treat it like any other feature adoption message: "hey, have you tried this?" Magic Patterns gave me free credits. They put skin in the game. Think about what your version of that looks like. Extended trial access to the feature, a free migration service, a setup wizard that cuts the manual work in half. The goal is to get users past the finish line, because the IKEA effect research is very clear on this: incomplete investment creates zero additional attachment. People need to finish the task for the magic to work.

3.Time the prompt to a moment of momentum.

Magic Patterns showed me this when I opened the product, when I was already in work mode, already engaged, already likely to say yes. Don't bury the investment prompt in an onboarding email three days after signup when the user has already mentally moved on. Show it when they're in the product, doing things, riding the energy of something they just accomplished.

When it backfires:

If your users haven't hit initial value yet, asking them to invest deeper feels like you're piling homework on top of homework. You're essentially asking someone to furnish a house they haven't decided to rent. I see this a lot with B2B tools that rush users into complex setup flows before anyone has seen a single result. If activation metrics are still weak, fix that first. Pushing investment too early accelerates churn.

Better move here: focus on a time-to-value sprint. Strip the first session down to one clear result. Then introduce the investment play on return visit two or three, when they've already decided the product does something useful for them.

If you forget everything, remember this:

Activation gets users in the door. But it's investment that makes them stay. The products with the strongest long-term retention are the ones that get you to build something inside them you don't want to leave behind. And the smartest ones make that building feel like a gift, not a chore.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

Hey everyone! If you have thoughts on Ghosted, feedback, requests, you can comment right on Beehiiv or hit reply. I read all of it.

This week I spent way too long on a pricing page, and the product caught me.

Btw, don’t ignore this 👇

submit a product you are curious about

The Find

Riverside — recording platform for podcasters and video creators. Their pricing page has four plans, monthly and yearly billing, and feature lists that go on forever. It's a lot to take in.

I was looking through the plans and about five seconds in, a popup showed up 👇

So I took it. Eight questions about what I'm trying to do, how often I record, whether I need a team workspace, that kind of thing. Most of them were just two options 👇

Everything is coming into focus.

Join beehiiv live on July 16th at 1PM ET for a first look at the future of audience-led business.

This isn’t just another feature launch (though there will be plenty of those). It’s a look at a more connected future for creators and brands that are tired of juggling disconnected tools, platforms, and data.

If you care about building an audience online, this is worth your time.

Reserve your spot.

And at the end: one recommendation. "The Business plan is a great fit for you."

For the record: I think the quiz is far from perfect; you could tell it even by looking at the last screen. But the idea of going through pricing as a conversation felt completely different from squinting at four columns trying to figure out which features I actually care about.

Riverside's pricing is genuinely complex because their customers are genuinely different. Solo podcasters, video production teams, enterprise webinar operations. They can't collapse that into two clean tiers. So they built something that catches you when you're stuck and walks you through the decision.

Does your pricing page do anything when someone freezes?

Why it works: psychology behind

There’s that famous jam study in 2000. Tasting booth at a grocery store in Menlo Park. One Saturday, 24 varieties were on display. Another, just 6. More people stopped at the big display (60% vs 40%), but way more actually bought from the small one. 30% purchased from the 6-jam table, only 3% from the 24-jam one.

The obvious read is "fewer options = more sales." That advice falls apart when your product genuinely serves different audiences and you need those tiers. Riverside can't cut their plans down to two because a solo podcaster and an enterprise webinar team need completely different things.

What the quiz does is break one overwhelming comparison into a sequence of small, easy questions. Each answer eliminates paths you don't need. By question eight, you've already made the decision in pieces without realizing you were doing it. The complexity is still there, you just never had to hold all of it in your head at once.

Sometimes you can't escape a complex screen. What you actually can do is help people walk through it.

The Playbook

When to keep it in mind:

Don't count your plans. Look at your data. If people spend real time on your pricing page and then bounce without converting, that's them telling you they wanted to buy but couldn't navigate the decision. If your support team keeps getting "which plan should I pick?" tickets, same thing. If pricing conversion is healthy, a quiz just adds steps nobody asked for.

How to use it:

1. Show it when someone's stuck.

Riverside triggers the popup after about five seconds of scrolling. If someone lands and picks a plan right away, they don't need a quiz. It's for the people who keep scrolling, keep comparing, keep not clicking. Time-on-page and scroll depth are the simplest triggers. Cursor drifting toward the back / logo / buttons or top right corner works too.

2. Ask about their situation, not your features.

Riverside's early questions get this right: what are you creating, how often, team or solo. Those are questions about me. But by question seven, it asks me to choose from a list of advanced features like CRM integrations and brand governance. That's the pricing table repackaged as multiple choice. Keep every question in the user's world and map their answers to your tiers on the backend.

3.Land on one recommendation with a clear CTA and maybe even some social proof.

The result says "The Business plan is a great fit for you" and then a ton of text. Don’t do this. Highlight the features I said I cared about, add “upgrade” and “book a demo” CTAs, and throw in some review from a person who represents my use case.

When it backfires:

If your tiers are obviously segmented by role or company size, the segmentation already does the guiding. Adding a quiz creates friction where there's no confusion. Also watch quiz length. Riverside runs eight questions, and honestly, that's a lot for something labeled "1-minute." If users bail halfway through, you've just created a new drop-off point.

If you forget everything, remember this:

Self-serve still needs hand-holding sometimes. When a screen is genuinely complex, the worst thing you can do is leave people alone with it because you believe that demos and additional steps are horrible.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

Hey everyone! This week I have a story about urgency, specifically, about how most products manufacture it badly, and what it looks like when it shows up on its own. I also panicked a little. You'll see.

Btw, don’t ignore this 👇

submit a product you are curious about

The Find

I use Inkless for my contracts. E-signing tool, free plan, does the job.

This week I was prepping a partnership agreement for a new client, and my head was clearly somewhere else, because I made a typo in my own email domain. The contract sends to me and the client for signatures. I only caught it when my copy didn't show up. Checked spam. Nothing. Went back to the document, looked at the email, and there it was. Wrong domain.

So now an actual legal document is sitting in some stranger's inbox. I was, not gonna lie, a little panicking.

Then I saw the tiny pencil icon next to the recipient. Omg, I can edit!!

I hit it immediately.

Upgrade wall.

Look, this upgrade page is not good. All three plans stacked, no context about what I actually need, completely generic. We've talked about this in the newsletter, if you do a feature-locked upgrade, it should be about that feature, not your entire pricing table.

But I barely noticed. Because I wasn't browsing features. I was mid-panic trying to fix a mistake. The trigger did more heavy lifting than any part of that pricing page.

Stop babysitting dashboards. Ship from Slack. Touch grass.

700+ teams have Viktor reading their Google Ads every morning.

Your media team opens Slack at 8am. There's a cross-platform brief in #growth: Google Ads spend vs. ROAS, Meta CPA by campaign, Stripe revenue by channel. Viktor posted it at 6am. Nobody asked for it.

Last week, one team's Viktor caught a spend spike at 2am on a broad match campaign and flagged it in Slack: "CPA up 340%. Recommend pausing and shifting budget to the top two performers." That would have burned $3K by morning. The media buyer woke up to a problem already handled.

Your strategist reviews spend trends. Your account manager checks revenue attribution. Same Slack channel, same colleague, before anyone's first coffee.

Google Ads, Meta, Stripe. One message. No Looker, no Data Studio. Anomaly detection runs around the clock. Cross-platform reporting runs on autopilot.

5,700+ teams. SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.

"Viktor is now an integral team member, and after weeks of use we still feel we haven't uncovered the full potential." — Patrick O'Doherty, Director, Yarra Web

Start free. $100 in credits →

Why it works: psychology behind

George Loewenstein published a paper in 1996 called "Out of Control" about what happens to decision-making when people are in what he called visceral states: fear, pain, urgency, hunger. The kind of states where your body is involved, not just your brain.

His finding: people in these hot states make fundamentally different choices than when they're calm. And, this is the part that matters for your product, people in calm states can't predict how they'll behave in hot ones. The gap between the two is large and consistent.

Every product team I've seen designs upgrade triggers in a calm state. Meeting room, Figma file, "let's A/B test the CTA." Meanwhile, the user on the other end might be mid-panic. And in that state, your carefully worded pricing page barely registers.

Now think about how most products manufacture urgency. Countdown timers. "Limited offer." "Only 3 spots left." Your users know it's fake — they've seen the same timer reset three times. No visceral state fires because there's nothing real behind it.

A typo in a live contract? That's real. Your user's body is involved. A mediocre upgrade page almost got me because nothing about that urgency was manufactured.

The Playbook

When to use it:

Any product where users hit moments of real stakes under time pressure they didn't choose. You're on a free plan of your tax software, and it's April 14th, the deadline is the government's, not the product's, but the upgrade trigger benefits all the same. You're screen-sharing a design to an important client, and there's a watermark on it or a time limit. Or, well, you sent a contract to the wrong email, and you need to fix it. It works when something real is on the line, and your users actually have an urgent problem to solve.

How to use it:

Three natural urgency moments to map:

1. "I broke something." Users don't comparison-shop when they're trying to undo an error, they buy the fix. Find where your users make mistakes and put an upgrade path right there.

2. "I'm about to lose something I built." Nobody made a mistake here, but the loss is concrete. Kahneman and Tversky showed that losses hurt roughly twice as hard as gains feel good. Speak to that.

3. "Someone is waiting and I can't deliver." This is an external factor, and you won’t know if it hits without testing the message, but I personally upgraded products multiple times, driven by this reason. A client just said yes and needs the proposal today. A prospect responded, and the conversation is hot. The user needs to move now, and the free plan is too slow or too limited. The urgency comes from someone else's shrinking attention window.

When it backfires:

Now, the part nobody plans for. These triggers convert well. But the user who upgrades mid-panic (reasons 1 and 3) didn't fall in love with your product. They bought an emergency fix.

Panic-upgraded users need their own onboarding. Show them what else they just unlocked. Get them using two or three paid features in the first week, the ones they didn't come for. Otherwise you turned urgency into a one-time payment and churn.

If you forget everything, remember this:

Stop building urgency with countdown timers that your users have learned to ignore. Map where urgency already lives in your product and offer relief.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

About once a month, I'll sit down with a founder or growth expert and ask them three things: what frustrates them the most about user behavior, what mistakes teams keep making trying to fix it, and which products actually did a great job and converted them personally.

Pretty cool, huh? I know you don’t care about the textbook. You want to know what actually happens in those bloody growth trenches.

And the first issue is with Lisa Heiss — a UX designer and PLG expert. We've collaborated on projects at ProductLed and bonded over a pretty similar approach to growth.

She didn't give me polished answers, thank God, it’s pretty spicy.

Btw, don’t ignore this 👇

submit a product for a breakdown

The user behavior that kills our lovely funnel

I asked Lisa what drives her crazy about users right now. She went straight for it:

❝

The attention span. How bad we've gotten at paying attention to anything longer than two seconds. If I'm trying to market a product to you and you can't even read three bullet points, it gets very hard."

Lisa Heiss

And the landscape around this has shifted fast. Users aren't stuck with you anymore (bummer, I know). They find another tool by tomorrow. They build their own over the weekend (or they think they can and that’s enough).

❝

"If I can't solve it with your tool, either I build my own or I figure out another tool. There's not much dependency on what you do."

Lisa Heiss

So you've got users who won't read your copy, won't sit through your onboarding, won't give you more than a few seconds, and they have zero reason to try harder because the next alternative is one search away.

Now look at what most teams do about it.

How teams make it worse

Mistake one: explain harder.

Teams see users skipping their flows and think the problem is comprehension. So they add more. More onboarding steps. More tooltips. More checklists. Lisa fights this approach like hell:

❝

"Show how the product drives and changes behavior. That is your explanation. If you can do that with fewer screens, that's the thing we care about."

Lisa Heiss

Your explanation should be the product working, not words about the product working.

I never adopted Notion (almost a crime for a person in SaaS). Never paid for it. I keep forgetting it exists, it never built itself into how I already work. My husband downloaded it once. Back then, they had this typed-in checklist on the main page as their onboarding. He didn't even register it as an onboarding. He saw text sitting there and moved on. Had no idea he was supposed to do anything with it.

For every clever onboarding, there's a person who just wants things very clear, very simple, and right next to where they are. Clever that doesn't land is invisible. Invisible loses users before they've done a single thing.

Mistake two: trap them.

Some products skip the explanation entirely and go straight to making it impossible to leave. Lisa has a real grudge against Adobe (who doesn’t?):

❝

"I was tricked into what started as 20 bucks a month. It renewed for 60, and it turned out to be an annual contract I was paying monthly, tied in without knowing it. I will do anything to not use Photoshop. Any AI product that does the same job, I'll use it just because of that."

Lisa Heiss

I had my own. A transcription tool, I needed one file done, signed up for what looked like a weekly trial, tried to cancel. No button. Nothing. I dug through their knowledge base, found a hidden email address, and sent a pretty aggressive message threatening a fraud claim with my bank (I know, very dramatic). The product did its job fine. But I will never open it again.

No one loves an abuser. We leave abusers. It's 2026, for God's sake.

❝

"People aren't obligated to stay with you. So these techniques just mean you end up with no loyal customer base. Nobody loves you for doing that."

Lisa Heiss

Mistake three: stop at the aha moment.

This is the one nobody wants to hear. I asked Lisa what she used to believe about growth that she's completely changed her mind on. She went straight for the sacred cow:

❝

"I'm not saying the aha moment doesn't matter, but that is not it. If you stop there, it's as good as having a good first date. You won't make him your boyfriend because you had a good first date."

Lisa Heiss

I've had a chicken-and-egg problem with this for a long time. Does performing this action make users motivated? Or are the users who perform it already more interested, and that's why they do it? If you bully everyone into one activation event, what happens to users who would've found value a different way? Would you even see the same correlation between that event and long-term upgrades if it's the only option you give people?

The part almost nobody designs for is what comes after. The daily loop. The thing that brings someone back on Tuesday without a reminder. Lisa said it directly:

❝

"Building a habit is incredibly hard. Very few designers are educated about it. Very few companies think about it in enough detail to actually make the product sticky."

Lisa Heiss

How many good habits do any of us even have? I quit my diet this week because a friend brought wine, and I was like, well, farewell. That's how easily a habit you actually want breaks. Now imagine building one around your SaaS product, in a market where users have a hundred alternatives and zero reason to be loyal.

How to earn an upgrade from a professional

I asked Lisa which products she started using for free and ended up happily paying for. Three came up. They all did the same thing, but each in a different way.

Magic Patterns — an AI design/prototyping tool that I love love love.

Lisa was skeptical, tried it free, got into a creative flow, and ran out of credits. The upgrade prompt didn't slam a gate. It pitched what she'd gain:

❝

"The way you were asked to upgrade didn't feel intrusive. They were marketing benefits instead of taking something away, you'll get double the speed, you'll deliver your work faster. It felt like a soft switch. You could come back the next day with free credits. Nobody was pressuring you."

Lisa Heiss

I know that feeling from Lovable. You're building something, you're in the middle of it, credits run out, and you just aren't done. The upgrade doesn't feel like a wall. It feels like continuing. But I pushed Lisa, because I've hit that "not done" moment with plenty of products and didn't upgrade most of them. Same interruption, completely different reaction. The difference is whether the product earned enough momentum before it asked. Whether you already experienced enough value that paying feels like a continuation, not a transaction.

CleanMyMac — laptop cleaning software, the kind of product Lisa would normally never buy. But before it mentioned money, it ran a full diagnosis of her machine:

❝

"You felt like they were giving you something real, this is how your laptop looks right now, here's what's working versus what's not. I wasn't learning about the product. It was showing me how it can help. It just felt effortless."

Lisa Heiss

The diagnosis was the onboarding. Value first. Payment second. No explanation needed because the product already proved itself.

Granola — a note-taking app that took the same principle even further. It read her calendar, detected a meeting, and just started working. No setup, no bot joining the call, nothing to configure. Every step she would've had to take was already handled.

Three products. One pattern. None of them tried to teach Lisa how they work. They all fit into the way she already works:

❝

"Our job is not to educate the users. Our job is to match the way they already think right now."

Lisa Heiss, I couldn’t agree more.

And transparency counts just as much. If users know exactly what they'll get, if that gap between "I don't know what will happen" and "I know exactly what I'm paying for" is as short as possible, trust builds fast.

One piece of advice for every growth team

I asked Lisa for the one thing she'd want every founder and growth team to hear right now. She said the fear in the market, am I being replaced, is my product even relevant tomorrow, is paralyzing people who should be moving:

❝

"The shift isn't as black and white as the market makes it out to be. You're not an old SaaS that can't renew, and you're not a new AI product just hoping to survive. There's a very valid middle path: you have the distribution, you have a problem worth solving. Go innovate on that. Even if it's small pieces, even if the AI is for certain challenges only."

Lisa Heiss

She's right. I see this with teams I work with: they're so overwhelmed by the idea of rebuilding everything that they rebuild nothing. Meanwhile small, targeted improvements could already be making their product stickier.

Want to read more issues like this? Like, comment, and let me know. Have suggestions? Just reply to this email.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

Some of you know I work with Wes Bush — author of Product-Led Growth, and a whole team of other great PLG people. Internally, we keep coming back to the same thing: underestimating the gap between acquisition and activation is one of the most common mistakes team make.

And lately we've been talking more and more about how, especially with AI, activation doesn't have to wait until people sign up. Your landing page should already be doing that work.

So this week I went looking for products that actually pull it off. Not one example — three. Three levels of "show them the value before they commit." Let me walk you through what I found and why it works.

Btw, don’t ignore this 👇

submit a product you are curious about

The Find

Quick context: all three of these are AI-ish products with complex value props. The kind where a hero section and a feature grid don't really explain what you're getting.

1. The end result.

Relay.app is workflow automation — Zapier meets AI agents. On their landing page, you can browse actual templates other people built. Click through, see the agent, see the workflow, see the output. Before you sign up, you already know what problems this thing solves and roughly how your result will look 👇

I don't know about you, but that's way more convincing than "automate your workflows with AI" in a headline. I can see how it will look like for me.

2. The daily experience.

Weave measures engineering performance and AI impact. Their landing page has these interactive, animated dashboard previews — not static screenshots, not marketing renders. You can see how data moves, how charts respond, what it would feel like to check this every morning 👇

The less cartoonish and polished it looks, the better. This feels like peeking into the actual product. My brain stops treating it as an ad and starts treating it as experience.

3. The start.

Lovable’s landing page is the product. There's a prompt field right there. You type what you want, and it starts building. No account, no email, nothing. By the time they ask you to sign up, you've already got the sense of progress you don't want to lose 👇

So: three products, three levels. Show the output. Simulate the experience. Let them do the thing. Does your landing page do any of these?

Why it works: psychology behind

There's a concept in consumer psychology called mental simulation — your ability to picture yourself using something before you commit to it.

Most landing pages force the user to do all the simulation work themselves. Read the headline, look at a screenshot, imagine what it means for your specific job. The problem? Imagination is lossy. Every gap you leave, the user fills with doubt.

Each of these three products closes that gap differently. Relay replaces imagination with real artifacts — you see the output, so you don't have to guess.

Weave replaces static images with motion — you see the interaction, so your brain treats it as experience rather than marketing.

Lovable removes the gap entirely — you're not simulating use, you're doing it, and now Bandura's self-efficacy kicks in. You don't wonder if you can use this product. You already proved you can.

The progression matters: the more concrete and interactive the preview, the less the user has to imagine, and the less they doubt.

The Playbook

When to keep it in mind:

Any product where the gap between "landing page" and "first real value" is long enough to lose people. AI products especially — because AI makes it cheap to generate previews, interactive demos, and real product experiences dynamically. If you're still relying on hero images and feature bullets, you're leaving activation on the table.

How to use it:

1. Start with the output.

Let people browse real results — templates, reports, projects that existing users built. Relay does this well. The cost is low: you're surfacing content that already exists. I'd push most teams to start here — it's the fastest win with the least engineering effort. If your product's value is visible in its artifacts, show them.

2. Add motion.

Go beyond static screenshots. Interactive previews, animated walkthroughs, GIFs that capture what daily use looks like. Weave does this with their dashboard demos. The key: it has to feel real, not produced. The moment it looks like a marketing render, the user's brain discounts it. Rough and honest beats slick and staged every time.

3.Drop the gate entirely.

Let the user start a real task before asking for credentials. Lovable nails this — type a prompt, watch your app get built(ish), sign up only after you have something to lose. Fair warning: this only works if your product can deliver a meaningful result fast or showcase the process at least. If you need config, data import, or team setup before value, Level 1 or 2 is the smarter move. But honestly? I’m sure some part can be delivered earlier.

When it backfires:

If the real product experience doesn't match the landing page preview. You've set an expectation now — and you have to deliver on it immediately after signup. An interactive demo that looks gorgeous, followed by an empty dashboard and a 12-step onboarding wizard, will hurt you more than a generic landing page ever would. The in-product experience has to pick up where the landing page left off and be a logical next step.

If you forget everything, remember this:

Your landing page doesn't exist to describe value. It exists to simulate, show it. The less your user has to imagine, the less they have to doubt — and the more likely they are to sign up and actually stick.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

The last couple of months have been dense. I covered everything from free tier psychology to AI agents to why I personally rage-quit a payment screen. I know you don't read every issue (even though you should! Ghosty is watching you) so here are the five most popular ones from the past 2 months. Picked by your peers and yourself.

Btw, a reminder that you can always submit ANY product you are curious about for my breakdown ↓

submit a product you are curious about

#1 — How to drive advanced feature adoption

I didn't expect this one to land so hard, but it did. If you're still onboarding users through passive checklists — "install the extension," "connect your CRM" — this breaks down why that approach teaches nothing.

#2 — What kills a great upgrade trigger

Grammarly built one of the best upgrade triggers I've ever seen — and then killed it with the checkout flow. There's a template inside for how to design an upgrade trigger that doesn't reopen decisions your user already made. Save-worthy if you're touching anything on the payment side.

#3 — How an AI agent can make things worse

If you're adding an AI chat to your funnel — or thinking about it — read this before you ship. G2's bot drained a warm lead's motivation in under 20 minutes. Three redesigned chat mockups inside showing what "actually helpful" could look like.

#4 — 3 reasons I didn't pay Claude

I wanted to give Anthropic money. Like, actually wanted. And then their upgrade screen scared me off in four screens. This one's about how to design a payment moment that doesn't make your users do mental risk math for a purchase they've already decided to make.

#5 — Why users don't engage with your free plan

Most free users have never seen your pricing page. They saw "free," they signed up. So if your onboarding doesn't tell them what's included before setup — they won't set anything up, won't get a result, and won't upgrade. Relay.app nailed it with one screen. Three checks inside for designing a free tier that actually gets people to a result.

🎉 Thank you for reading Ghosted. I’ll see you next Sunday!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

I might be biased, but I'm genuinely impressed every time I spot a good solution from an actual giant. Most of my attention goes to startups — that's where I've worked my whole career and that's where the stakes feel real. So it's rare for a giant to… actually care?

This week though, Google did. And the move is one any SaaS team could steal.

Why not steal what's good? We aren’t picky, righ?

Btw, a reminder that you can always submit ANY product you are curious about for my breakdown ↓

submit a product you are curious about

The Find

Google Workspace wants me on a higher tier. This week they showed me this — parked at the top of my Gmail inbox, right between the toolbar and my actual emails:

Three things we should pay attention to.

1.Where it lives — in my inbox, where my brain is actually on.

Inside Gmail (aka the core product)? I'm focused. I'm doing actual work. And honestly, this matters more than it sounds like.

The best upgrade triggers don't come from the biggest exposure. They come from the few places where the user is already paying attention. And attention is expensive and rare.

2.The pitch — one specific problem, not a feature list.

Most tier upgrades try to sell you the whole bundle: advanced admin, DLP, Vault, eDiscovery, custom retention — you get the idea. You're supposed to read it and figure out which ones apply to your life.

Do you think Google Workspace has more than 1 feature? Exactly. But they don’t lead with all of them, right? This one picks one job: security, handled. That’s a much easier yes for me + helps you get better insights about what features drive upgrades.

3.The evidence.

"149K+ weekly phishing emails to small businesses." That's just showing me what's actually happening out there — no fear-mongering needed. "Protect your team" would have been generic noise I'd scroll past. A real number makes the threat feel real — teams like mine, getting hit constantly. The problem stops being theoretical.

What about your upgrade triggers? How many features are there?

Why it works: psychology behind

The mechanism here is cognitive offloading, the fancy name for "our brains hand mental work to external tools whenever they can." It's automatic, not a conscious choice.

There’s a classic experiment, "The Google Effect", yes, I get the irony.

Participants were given trivia facts to type into a computer. Half were told their entries would be saved. Half were told they'd be erased. Then everyone got tested — on the facts themselves, and on where the facts were saved.

The "saved" group remembered the facts much worse, but remembered exactly where to find them. Your brain doesn't even ask permission. The external system exists, so the work goes there.

Now apply this to upgrades. Most tier pitches ask you to take on more — more features, more access, more capabilities. Which means more stuff to fit into your head: which features matter, what they do, whether you'll use them. Your brain resists that.

Workspace's pitch does the opposite. It asks you to hand over one job, security, to them.

One offer instead of twelve asks.

The Playbook

When to keep it in mind:

Any tier upgrade where the higher tier is a bundle (which is most of SaaS), outside of the actual pricing page. The temptation is to show users everything they'd unlock because you built it all. Resist that! Pick one problem you know your users have and lead with it. The rest of the bundle still comes with the upgrade.

How to use it:

1. Pitch where users already have attention.

The real landing zone is inside the product, right after the success moment, when the brain is engaged. Workspace's card sits in Gmail because that's where email problems get felt. For your product, figure out where the pain of the thing you're selling actually shows up — Drive storage in Drive, Calendar scheduling in Calendar — and put the upgrade there.

2. Lead with one specific problem, not a feature list.

Open a typical tier upgrade card, and you get a task instead of a solution. Every item is something the user has to test against their own job. That's work you're asking them to do before they've agreed to pay. Pick one problem. The rest of the bundle is still in the tier — they just don't open with it. If the user clicks because of the one thing that matters to them, they get all twelve. If they don't click because of all twelve, you never got the chance.

3. Make the problem real with evidence, not abstract urgency, and no counters unless they are real-real-real.

Most upgrade triggers lean on trops: "Limited time!" or "Protect your team!" None of them make the problem feel real. Workspace shows 149K+ weekly phishing emails hitting small businesses. A concrete number you can picture. And notice — this is real, ongoing evidence, not a countdown timer or a fake deadline. Evidence moves people; abstract language doesn't.

When it backfires:

Here's the catch. Specific pitches are risky. Generic pitches fail evenly. Specific pitches fail loudly. When they miss, the user has a real reason to actively dismiss.

Aaaand… that was me this week. All three things that should have worked on me… didn't:

• My team is three people. "Security for your team" pitches a coordination problem I don't have, I can brief everyone over coffee.

• I've never been phished. "Protect from phishing" pitches a pain I haven't felt (and I hope, won’t).

• The button doesn't show the price, so I couldn't even evaluate if the trade was worth it, I don’t remember how much I pay for every subscription.

The issue isn't that Google picked security. They picked security for someone like me, who doesn't feel that specific pain. Which means the real bar here is targeted specificity. Google knows my team size, my phishing history, my Drive usage. They led with the wrong one.

Better move: target the problem to what you already know about the user. Team size, usage patterns, behavioral signals — a password reset last week, a teammate added yesterday. Or just test. See what sticks and try to find the pattern.

If you forget everything, remember this:

No one wants to think. Testing 12 1-feature-focused upgrade triggers over time will tell you more than showing a full bundle everywhere.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I also help SaaS teams get more upgrades by using psychology instead of cheap tricks. Because hype aside, people will be buying your product for many more years, AI or not AI.

This week I tried to book a demo with G2 for one of my clients. Should have been a 30-second job. Instead, I got a small masterclass in how an AI agent at the front of your funnel can drain a warm lead's motivation in under 20 minutes.

And the kicker — G2 is probably one of the most aware companies on the planet about how SaaS funnels work. So when they mess this up, it's worth paying attention. Maybe there’s an internal reason for this thing, but I find it hard to believe.

I'll walk you through what happened and what I think the actual lesson is. Because the obvious takeaway ("don't gate your demos") is wrong. The real one is more interesting.

The Find

Quick context: G2 is the big software review marketplace — Yelp for B2B SaaS. Their actual customers are vendors paying to be listed and reviewed. So a "demo" for them is a sales conversation about getting your product onto their platform.

I land on the demo page and see this 👇

Two CTAs side by side. A form on the right. A chat in the middle with "Kara, AI" already greeting me. I picked the chat because it felt faster and more proactive. Honestly, my first reaction was oh, cool — I can request a demo right inside the chat. So I clicked "Request a Demo" inside the conversation.

I'm in. I gave her my work email. Then this 👇

Wait, what?

I just gave her my email to set up the meeting. So I pushed back: "can I book it here and now?"

Right. So Kara cannot book the demo. The same Kara who, three messages ago, said she'd be delighted to set up the meeting. Damn, I feel heartbroken!

Twenty minutes later, an email arrives 👇

I almost missed it. The subject line was "Demo Request Received," which I read as a transactional confirmation (the kind of email I auto-archive). It's actually the next step. I have to go submit my product before they'll book the demo.

Now, let me be fair to G2. The gating itself is defensible. They sell to vendors with listed products. Filtering for that early saves their sales team from wasted calls. Same logic as a card-upfront trial: heavier friction, better conversion per lead. For their model, it works.

The gate isn't the issue. The AI front-end performing as someone about to remove the gate is the issue. It hands you back to the same multi-step flow you'd have gotten from a plain form, with three more steps tacked on that nobody mentioned until you were already past step three.

Be honest, does your AI chat live up to its promises?

Why these mistakes make users ghost

Richard Oliver formalized expectation-disconfirmation theory in 1980. People don't judge an experience by absolute quality, they judge it by the gap between what they expected and what they got. Miss the expectation, even slightly, and the negative feeling is much sharper than the equivalent positive would have been on the upside.

So the same multi-step flow can feel fine or feel insulting depending on what was promised at step one.

A plain form that says "we'll email you within 48 hours" sets a low expectation. When the email arrives in 20 minutes, you're pleasantly surprised.

Kara saying "I'd be delighted to help you book a demo" sets the expectation at "I'm about to get a calendar link." The same email then lands as a downgrade, proof nothing actually happened.

The AI persona makes the violation worse. Put a name, a photo, and a job title on a chat, Kara, and users transfer person-grade trust onto it. If Kara says she'll book a meeting, Kara will book a meeting. A plain form makes no such promise, so nothing breaks my heart.

Then let’s nerd about motivation. Motivation rises as a goal feels closer and falls fast when it recedes. G2's flow makes the demo feel imminent, then quietly moves it three steps further away. Each invisible step costs more motivation than the last, because each one is a fresh disconfirmation of what Kara promised at the top.

If I weren't doing this for a client, that's where the lead dies.

The Playbook

When to keep it in mind:

Anyone running an AI chat in front of a sales-led or hybrid funnel. The hotter the lead at the start of the chat, the bigger the cost of any promise the AI makes that the system can't keep.

How to use it:

1. Start with a promise audit

List every action verb your AI is allowed to use — "book," "set up," "schedule," "connect you with." For each one: can the system actually do this in the next 30 seconds? If not, the verb is wrong. "I'd be delighted to help you book a demo" fails the test when the bot can't book and won't even hand off until you submit a product. The honest version: "I can start your demo request — there are two steps before we book."

2. Then collapse the channels (if you can)

G2 split this flow across a chat and an email — combine them. Have Kara say it once: "Demos are reserved for vendors with a listed product. Want me to send you the submission link, then we'll book once your listing is live?" Take the email if you need the lead saved, but drop the next-step link inline, in the chat, while the user is still engaged. Again, unless you have a very solid internal reason to do otherwise.

3. If you have to send an email, make me notice it

"Demo Request Received" reads as a confirmation. If it's actually the next action, name it: "Submit your product to book your G2 demo" or even “Next step to launch on G2” would be better. Otherwise users archive it without opening, like I almost did.

Here are three high-level sketches of how the redesigned chat could look, depending on what G2's backend can support and what their product actually need👇

When it backfires:

If your AI front-end can't actually move the user closer to the goal, adding it doesn't save anyone time. It makes users walk the same journey twice: once in the chat, once in whatever flow they get routed to.

If you forget everything, remember this:

An AI agent only saves anyone time when it actually closes the gap, not when it just pretends.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I am also a product growth consultant. I help SaaS teams apply psychology and PLG to build growth they can actually control. I run my own project, Growing Pains, and also work with one of the leading PLG consulting agencies, ProductLed, led by Wes Bush.

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-kudrow/

Or check out my website, maybe we can work together: https://www.growingpains.consulting/

See you next week!

And honestly, this one surprised me.

Because when I reviewed the flow a week later with a cold expert eye, I thought it was pretty good. But this is not how I felt at the moment. Let’s dive in and see which reaction was right.

The Find

Last week's trigger was a pop-up inside your document that previews how your text improves with Pro, plus a $0.99 trial offer. I clicked.

Here's what I landed on. And look — there's a lot of objectively good stuff here. Trust signals from Atlassian, Zoom, Databricks. A "Most popular" badge on Pro. Savings percentages on annual and quarterly plans. A clear trial timeline that tells you when you'll get a reminder and when billing starts. Even the $0.99 is repeated everywhere so you know what today's charge is.

When I sat down to analyze this a week later (calm, no task in progress, looking at screenshots) I genuinely thought: this is a solid flow. Good design. Clear information.

But here's where the expert review becomes a trap.

Because I wasn't calm when I clicked.

I was in the middle of writing something. I saw my text get better. I wanted to pay $0.99 and get back to work. And instead I got this ☝️

Three plans: Basic (the one I already have, so why am I looking at it), Pro, and Enterprise (which takes up a third of the screen and does nothing for me as an individual user). Corporate logos that I can’t relate to because, again, I’m an individual user. I pick Pro, because… well, this is actually the only option for me.

This is what I saw next:

Now I'm choosing billing frequency. Another decision. Each with its own price, its own savings badge. I pick monthly.

Then the payment form. Four screens deep. At least four new decisions after I'd already said yes! By the second screen I honestly just wanted to get back to my document. I'd have happily paid the $0.99 already if they'd let me.

How many screens sit between your user's "yes" and their payment?

Why these mistakes make users ghost

George Loewenstein calls this the hot-cold empathy gap. When you're in a calm cognitive state, you systematically fail to predict how you'd behave in an emotional one. The reverse is true too. And critically, you can't design for emotional urgency while reviewing screenshots in a calm meeting room.

That's exactly what happened here. Someone designed this flow rationally: show all plans, add trust signals, highlight savings, give billing options. Every individual element makes sense. A conversion designer would approve this page.

But the sequence kills it. Grammarly's trigger puts you in a hot state: mid-task, you just saw your writing improve, the price is a no-brainer. Every condition for conversion is already met. Then the flow dumps you into an experience built for someone comparison shopping on a Saturday afternoon.

Iyengar and Lepper's jam study showed that people presented with 24 options were 10 times less likely to buy than those who saw 6. Grammarly's page isn't 24 jams. But it introduces decisions the trigger had already resolved. The trigger said $0.99. The page says "well, actually — annual, quarterly, or monthly?" That's reopening a closed decision. Every reopened decision is a moment where the user thinks "I'll come back to this later." Which means never.

The Playbook

When to keep it in mind:

Any time you ask users to pay for anything. Any product where the upgrade trigger catches users mid-task. Writing tools, design tools, dashboards — anything where the user is doing something when they hit the wall. The hotter the state at the trigger, the shorter the path to payment needs to be.

How to use it:

1. Match the checkout to the trigger, not to the pricing page.

If your trigger catches someone mid-flow with a specific offer, the next screen should be a card form with that offer pre-loaded. Not a pricing page. The trigger already did the selling. A small toggle at the top "Want a different plan?" handles the edge case without making it the default experience. Pre-select everything the trigger already told them.

2. Audit for reopened decisions.

Go through your post-trigger flow and ask: which of these choices did the trigger already answer? The price? The plan? The billing cycle? If the trigger said "$0.99 for Pro" and the next page asks "which plan?" — you just reopened a settled question. Every reopened decision cools the user down. Remove it or pre-fill it.

3. Separate your hot path from your cold path.

The trust signals, the plan comparison, the savings breakdowns, those are great. For cold-entry users coming from an email, your website nav, a Google search. They need to be sold. Your hot-entry users, the ones clicking a trigger mid-task, don't. Two entry points, two experiences. Don't route someone who already said yes through the pitch again.

Here’s a high-level idea of how it could look 👇

When it backfires:

If your trigger is vague, "Upgrade to Pro" with no price, no preview, no specifics, the user arrives cold even if they clicked mid-task. They need the comparison page because the trigger didn't resolve anything. This only works when the trigger itself is strong enough to close the sale. Grammarly's trigger is. Most aren't.

If you forget everything, remember this:

Your checkout was designed for review. But your users have work to do. Shorten the path; they have a bigger fish to fry.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I am also a product growth consultant. I help SaaS teams apply psychology and PLG to build growth they can actually control. I run my own project, Growing Pains, and also work with one of the leading PLG consulting agencies, ProductLed, led by Wes Bush.

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-kudrow/

Or check out my website, maybe we can work together: https://www.growingpains.consulting/

See you next week!

Of course I've always used tools like Grammarly — why wouldn't you? Great freemium product with a lot of smart moves up their sleeve. Today we'll look at one of them.

❝

And this is a two-parter: this week, what Grammarly absolutely nails. Next week, where the same flow completely falls apart, so stay tuned.

The Find

Grammarly — browser extension, writing assistant, lives wherever you type. I was working on some copy for clients this week when this popped up:

Three things jumped out.

1.It felt like a natural part of my workflow, not an external tool.

The upgrade prompt showed up right inside my writing — embedded in the exact spot where I was already working, when my attention was focused on the task.

2.I could see(ish) the result

The improved version of my text was right there — blurred, but kind of different from what I wrote. Not a feature list! A preview of my text, made better. One real value that I could almost touch.

3.Oh-so-low, $0.99.

Not $12/month. Not "start your free trial." A price so low it barely registers as a financial decision. More like buying a sticker than subscribing to software.

Most upgrade triggers yank you out of your flow, dump you on a pricing page, and ask you to evaluate a subscription. Grammarly's stays exactly where you are, shows real value, and then asks for pocket change.

When's the last time your product did that?

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Learn more

Why It Works

The mechanism behind that blurred preview is mental ownership — and it's sneakier than it sounds.

Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler ran the classic version in 1990. They handed half the participants a coffee mug and asked everyone to trade. Mug owners wanted about $7 to sell. Buyers offered about $3. Same mug, same room, same moment. The only difference: one group had held it for a few minutes.

Peck and Shu took it further in 2009, publishing in the Journal of Consumer Research. They found that merely touching a product, even briefly, increased feelings of ownership and willingness to pay. Imagining touching it worked too. The brain doesn't wait for a receipt to start feeling like something is yours.

Grammarly's preview does this with text. You see your writing with improvements applied. Blurry, but obviously better. That preview creates pseudo-ownership — the improved version already feels like yours. Dismissing it means giving up something that already feels like yours. Loss aversion makes that harder than never seeing it at all.

The $0.99 removes the last objection. When the price is this low, the mental math collapses.

The Playbook

When to use it:

Products where users create, write, design, or build something, literally anywhere where the output is personal and visible. The more the user can see their own work improved (or have a feeling of that), the stronger the ownership trigger fires.

How to build it, three moves:

1. Place the trigger inside the value moment, not after it.

Grammarly doesn't wait for you to finish writing and then upsell from a settings page. The offer shows up while you're mid-sentence, staring at your own imperfect text. That's the moment desire is highest. For your product, map where users are most aware of the gap between what they have and what they could have, and put the upgrade there.

2. Show the user's own result improved, not a feature list.

A feature list says "you could have this." A preview of the user's actual work, upgraded, says "look, it's already done." Grammarly shows my text with corrections applied. That's a completely different psychological object than "access advanced grammar suggestions." One creates mental ownership. The other creates a menu. I'd push further here: Grammarly still blurs the whole result. Imagine showing just one correction clearly. The endowment effect would be even stronger.

3. Price the first step like it doesn't matter.

$0.99 isn't a subscription price. It's an impulse price. Grammarly treats the entry as a foot in the door: get past the first transaction, and the psychological barrier to a full subscription drops later. If your upgrade starts at $15/month, consider whether a one-time micro-purchase for a specific feature might convert the people who'd never click "subscribe." A trial still asks them to decide. A dollar asks them to barely notice.

Want to design yourself? Save this ↓

When it backfires:

Products where the value is invisible: security, compliance, infrastructure. There's no "improved output" to preview, because there's nothing visual to show.

Better move: a usage report with reversed trial. Show users what the paid feature already did for them behind the scenes (threats blocked, errors caught, time saved), then offer the upgrade. Same principle, proof before payment, but a different medium.

If you forget everything, remember this:

The best upgrade trigger doesn't interrupt your user's work. It improves it, right there, in context, and charges so little that saying no feels harder than saying yes.

Next week in Part 2: what happens after you tap that $0.99 button, and why Grammarly's brilliant entry falls apart at the very next step.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I am also a product growth consultant. I help SaaS teams apply psychology and PLG to build growth they can actually control. I run my own project, Growing Pains, and also work with one of the leading PLG consulting agencies, ProductLed, led by Wes Bush.

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-kudrow/

Or check out my website, maybe we can work together: https://www.growingpains.consulting/

See you next week!

I love that. I think being radically self-aware about your own reactions as a user is the best growth hack you'll ever get. Only when you know what works for you and what doesn't can you separate empty tricks from real tactics. So I want to do more of this.

And I have an offer for you.

Below you can submit any product for me to review in one of the next issues. Your product, a competitor's product, something you use every day — anything. I'll go through everything, and if the case looks interesting, I'll publish it.

→ Want me to look at a product you're curious about? Submit names or links here:

Submit a product for behavioural review in Ghosted

tinyurl.com/ztbydp3u

Now, to this week's case.

The Find

Mymind is a personal AI assistant for saving things you find online — bookmarks, images, notes. A digital second brain.

A friend recommended it to me a while back, and because of that I came in with more trust than usual. I've been on the lowest tier for months now, mostly just saving bookmarks. They have a bunch of features on more expensive plans, but I honestly have no idea why I'd need any of them. Nobody's shown me.

Recently I opened the app and got hit with this:

Three problems with this.

1. It doesn't know what I've done.

   I already have the browser extension. The checklist doesn't care. It's showing me a task I completed weeks ago, which tells me immediately that this flow is generic. It's not reading my behavior, it's broadcasting a script.

2. It doesn't tell me why I would ever need it

   Install the mobile app — okay, but for what? What changes for me after I do it? What can I do on mobile that I can't do now? The checklist gives me a task with zero connection to a result I'd actually want.

3. It's completely disconnected from anything I'm actually doing

   I wasn't in the middle of saving something and wishing I had the mobile app. I wasn't trying to do a thing that required the extension. The checklist just... appeared. Like homework I didn't ask for.

And look, checklists are one of the most recommended onboarding patterns out there. Every PLG playbook mentions them. But most of the time, they're the thing that looks like it does the job without actually doing it. They give teams a sense of progress — "we have an onboarding flow!" — while teaching users absolutely nothing about why the product matters to them.

Are you onboarding users through a passive checklist, or through the work they came to do?

Why these mistakes make users ghost

Psychologists spent decades researching a framework called "desirable difficulties." The core finding: passive exposure creates a feeling of familiarity that people mistake for learning. Active generation (where you produce something yourself) creates encoding that actually sticks, with retention gains of 50–60%.

Map this onto onboarding. A passive checklist says "install the extension." You read it, maybe you do it, but nothing about the experience connects the feature to a result you care about.

A contextual nudge works the opposite way. Instead of listing features for users to tick off, you surface a feature during the task where it's useful. The user discovers it by doing, not by reading. They generate the experience themselves — and that's what sticks.

Nobody upgrades because they finished a to-do list. They upgrade because they hit a result worth repeating. Passive checklists skip the result entirely.

Your AI is resolving tickets. Is it keeping customers?

Resolution rates look great. But Gladly's 2026 Customer Expectations Report reveals the metric most CIOs are missing — and what the data says about where AI investments actually translate into retention, not just throughput.

See the findings

The Playbook

What a contextual nudge looks like in practice:

The same week I got Mymind's checklist, something completely different happened in Google Sheets. I was working in a spreadsheet and saw this:

No onboarding step. I was mid-task, and a new AI feature appeared exactly where it would be useful. One drag gesture to try it, on my actual data.

Google introduced an advanced capability at the right moment, through an activity I was already engaged in, aimed at improving the task I was already doing.

That's a contextual nudge. Mymind showed me a checklist and hoped I'd learn. Google Sheets put a capability in front of me while I was working and let me use it.

When to use contextual nudges:

Any time you need users to discover features beyond the basics. Every feature has a moment where it's most useful. The question is whether you introduce it there, or dump it in a checklist and hope for the best.

How to use it:

1. Trigger it from the task, not from a list.

The Google nudge appeared because I had blank cells next to filled columns. It read my context and showed up at the right moment. Mymind's checklist didn't know I already had the extension. If your prompt can't adapt to what the user has actually done, it's broadcasting, not helping.

2. Lead with the outcome I want, not the action your OKR needs.

The first thing Google showed me was "Transform blank cells into actionable data instantly." The result I'd get, before asking me to do anything. Mymind said "Install the mobile app." A chore with no visible payoff. Name what changes for the user before you ask them to act.

3. Let them try it right there.

Google gave me a "Try it now" button and a one-gesture drag. I could experience the feature on my own data without leaving my spreadsheet. Mymind gave me a padlock icon and a task to complete somewhere else. If the user has to leave their current flow to try the feature, most won't bother.

When it backfires:

If your product needs sequential setup before anything works (connecting a CRM, importing data, configuring permissions) you can't wait for a mid-task moment because there's no task yet.

In that case, use a guided setup with inline previews: show what the user will be able to do after each step, with real examples from their data or use case. The principle stays the same: connect every setup action to a visible outcome, even if that outcome is a few steps away.

If you forget everything, remember this:

A passive checklist tells users what to do. A contextual nudge lets them do it. The gap between those two is the gap between reading about your product and experiencing it. And nobody upgrades because they read a to-do list.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I am also a product growth consultant. I help SaaS teams apply psychology and PLG to build growth they can actually control. I run my own project, Growing Pains, and also work with one of the leading PLG consulting agencies, ProductLed, led by Wes Bush.

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-kudrow/

Or check out my website, maybe we can work together: https://www.growingpains.consulting/

See you next week!

Hey everyone! I wanted to give Anthropic money this week. Like, actually wanted. Was mid-task in Claude, hit my limit, and wanted to keep going. Four screens later I clicked Cancel. Why? Because of 3 mistakes that no one should repeat.

The Find

You know what Claude is. I'm a paying Pro subscriber. I use it for work every day.

So I hit my session limit. The banner pops up: "You've hit your session limit" with a "Keep working" button. Pretty good CTA, and the placement is right where it needs to be.

I clicked it. Picked "Pay per message." And then the product showed me this:

I stared at this screen for two full minutes. Then I closed it. Here’s why:

1. I had no idea how much I'd be paying.

   The screen says "extra usage" but nothing about cost. Not a range, not a per-message rate, nothing. The only hint is a link to a help center article (good luck with that). I'd have to leave this modal, open a new tab, read a support page, and come back. For a spontaneous purchase. Nobody does that.

2. I couldn't tell if this was one-time or recurring.

   "Turn on extra usage" sounds like flipping a switch. Switches stay on. Would this charge me once? Would it auto-charge every time I hit my limit? I have a credit card with a large limit linked to it.

   That distinction is the difference between "I'll spend a few bucks today" and "I’ll be charged $2000 tomorrow because I got into an argument with AI."

3. I had no clue what would happen when I clicked "Turn on."

   They have my card on file. Would clicking charge me immediately? Or would I get another screen to pick an amount? I was sitting there doing mental risk math for a purchase I'd already decided to make.

Does your payment confirmation actually answer these three questions? Before the button, not after?

88% resolved. 22% stayed loyal. What went wrong?

That's the AI paradox hiding in your CX stack. Tickets close. Customers leave. And most teams don't see it coming because they're measuring the wrong things.

Efficiency metrics look great on paper. Handle time down. Containment rate up. But customer loyalty? That's a different story — and it's one your current dashboards probably aren't telling you.

Gladly's 2026 Customer Expectations Report surveyed thousands of real consumers to find out exactly where AI-powered service breaks trust, and what separates the platforms that drive retention from the ones that quietly erode it.

If you're architecting the CX stack, this is the data you need to build it right. Not just fast. Not just cheap. Built to last.

See the data

Why these mistakes make users ghost

When people can't see the terms of what they're buying, they don't just hesitate. They value the whole offer below its worst realistic outcome.

Gneezy, List, and Wu ran this across over 1,000 participants. People paid $38 for a guaranteed $50 gift card. But for a coin flip between $50 and $100? Only $28. The better deal felt worse because the outcome was fuzzy. They called it the uncertainty effect.

Claude's screen does exactly this. I would've happily paid $5-$15 to keep working. But the screen wouldn't tell me what I'd pay, whether it was recurring, or what the button would do. So the whole offer collapsed.

For upgrades, the kill chain is short: fuzzy terms, perceived risk, no click, lost revenue. Keep in mind: this is how you lose the users who already wanted to say yes.

The Playbook

When this matters:

Any time you ask users to pay for anything. But especially when the decision is supposed to be fast. Mid-task, at a usage limit, inside a flow where stopping to think means losing momentum. If you want the user to move quickly, your screen has to do the thinking for them.

How to use it:

1. Show the cost and what it buys on the same screen.

Don't make users click away to learn what they'll pay. An editable amount, a $5 default, quick presets, and a plain-language estimate like "covers about 60 to 120 messages." One screen, one decision. If your user has to Google your pricing mid-purchase, it's over.

2. Let users control recurring vs. one-time.

A toggle that says "auto-recharge when empty" with a one-line explanation. Default it to off. The user who wants auto-recharge will turn it on, and they'll trust it more because they chose it. Everyone else sees it's off and relaxes.

3. Say what happens when they click.

"You’ll be charged on the next screen." One sentence. Users shouldn't have to gamble money to find out if there's a confirmation step.

Here, I actually spent 2 minutes with Clause to design a simple mockup of the paywall that would make me pay. Hope it didn’t seem mean:

When it backfires:

Honestly, in B2C almost never. If showing your price upfront scares people off, the problem is the price, not the screen. Transparency doesn't kill conversions. Bad pricing kills conversions. Transparency just lets you find out faster.

If you forget everything, remember this:

Every screen that asks for money has one job: answer the user's questions before they have to ask. How much, on what terms, what happens when I click. Get those wrong and you're selling uncertainty. Nobody pays for that.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I am also a product growth consultant. I help SaaS teams apply psychology and PLG to build growth they can actually control. I run my own project, Growing Pains, and also work with one of the leading PLG consulting agencies, ProductLed, led by Wes Bush.

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-kudrow/

Or check out my website, maybe we can work together: https://www.growingpains.consulting/

See you next week!

Okay, let's get straight into a heartbreaking truth of this week:

If people sign up to your free plan, it doesn't mean they understand what's in it. Most don't. Wow, right?

And if they don't know what they have before they start setting things up, they won't set things up, they won't engage, and they won't upgrade.

Let’s dive in.

The Find

I was going through Relay.app's onboarding last week. Relay is workflow automation (Zapier meets AI agents). Not a "sign up and go" product. You need to invest real time before you see any value.

During onboarding, before I'd connected a single app, one of the steps hit me with this:

I keep signing up for freemium products, and I almost never see this. Most throw you into setup: "connect your CRM," "build your first workflow", without telling you what's actually included on free.

And here's the thing: most free users have never seen your pricing page. They saw "free," they signed up.

So the only place you can tell them what they have is inside the product, before they start doing anything.

Does your onboarding do that?

Why It Works

This is ambiguity aversion — yes, you've heard of it. But the application here goes beyond the usual paywall stuff.

In 1961, Ellsberg sat people down in front of two urns filled with colored balls. Pick an urn, draw a ball, get the right color, win money. Urn A had 50 red and 50 black and you could see the split. Urn B had 100 balls too, but nobody told you the ratio. The math works out the same. People overwhelmingly picked Urn A.

Most teams think about this at the pricing page. But the same bias hits at setup. When a user doesn't know what free includes, every onboarding step carries a background question: am I building something I won’t be able to use?

And this kills upgrades, not just engagement.

Nobody upgrades because they completed onboarding (I know, shocking, right?). They upgrade because they got a result they want to repeat.

But if the user wasn't sure the free tier would let them get there, they never invested in setup.

No setup, no result, no upgrade moment.

The Playbook

When to use it:

Products where setup is the bottleneck — integrations, workflows, anything that takes real effort before value. The higher the setup cost, the more your users need to know what they're working with before they start.

How to use it:

If your product passes the “when”, find a way to communicate these 3 things during onboarding.

1. Tell users whether the output is usable on free.

Users have been burned before. Build for free, but exporting or sharing the result? That's premium. If your free tier does let them use the output, say it. Explicitly. If users know upfront that free delivers a real, usable result, they'll invest in setup. That setup leads to value. That value leads to upgrades. If they're not sure, they won't start.

2. Show which features are included before they start building.

The user has a specific job in mind. Don't make them discover whether their integration or AI step is included by clicking into it and seeing a lock icon. List what's available upfront. Every hard paywall a user hits before they've experienced value is a paywall with zero context, the worst moment to ask for money.

3. Give context for the limits, not just numbers.

Relay shows "200 steps/month, 500 AI credits." Better than nothing. But 500 credits means nothing to someone who doesn't know what a "credit" costs. One line like "that's enough to run 10 workflows daily" turns a raw number into something the user can estimate against their real workload. Help them see that free covers enough to validate the product. Once they have that proof, wanting more is what drives the upgrade.

When it backfires:

If your free tier is thin (1 project, 1 feature, no integrations) communicating that upfront just scares people off. Great, no ambiguity. Also no users.

Better move: a reverse trial. Start them on paid, let them get the result, then downgrade. Now "upgrade" means "get back this specific thing you already use." Much stronger trigger than "imagine what you could do if you paid."

If you forget everything, remember this:

Nobody studies your product before starting for free. They just start. Your free tier needs the same communication effort as your paid plans. Because in PLG, the users who don't engage are the users who never upgrade.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I am also a product growth consultant. I help SaaS teams apply psychology and PLG to build growth they can actually control. I run my own project, Growing Pains, and also work with one of the leading PLG consulting agencies, ProductLed, led by Wes Bush.

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-kudrow/

Or check out my website, maybe we can work together: https://www.growingpains.consulting/

See you next week!

This isn't a regular issue because it's my birthday.

So I wanted to catch the Stranger Things play in NY instead of writing an issue share my top 5 favorite issues because even though it breaks my heart, I know that not all of you read each and every one of them (I'm watching you).

Jokes aside, I love writing Ghosted. And it makes me genuinely happy that it resonates with about 1500 people, and they can’t all be my family, so there are some real subscribers for sure. Thank you for reading. You are cool.

If you want to congratulate me, just share this newsletter with someone who might enjoy it, I’ll love you forever.

HB Anastasia, I’ll share the newsletter

You can also email me with any suggestions, topic requests, or the main reasons why you read Ghosted every week. It will really help me to write great issues in the future.

Okay, let's jump to the top 5:

Top-5 issues that will help you drive upgrades

• The counterintuitive reason users ghost your upgrades

• When subscriptions kill your revenue

• How to design upsells that don’t get ghosted

• How to make locked features drive upgrades

• Why users leave your “fully customizable product”

If you forget everything, remember this:

The best upgrades work with how people think, not against it. Most teams fight it. But let’s be smarter, shall we?

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I am also a product growth consultant. I help SaaS teams apply psychology and PLG to build growth they can actually control. I run my own project, Growing Pains, and also work with one of the leading PLG consulting agencies, ProductLed, led by Wes Bush.

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-kudrow/

Or check out my website, maybe we can work together: https://www.growingpains.consulting/

See you next week!

I went through a breakup this week.

I left Calendly. After two years.

Not because it was bad, it worked fine. But my colleague mentioned TidyCal, I looked at the price ($29, once, forever), did three seconds of math against my $10/month Calendly bill, and that was it. Exported my schedule, imported it into the new tool, and the whole switch took about five minutes.

Two years of loyalty, gone in five minutes. And it got me thinking about how fragile "loyalty" really is when someone makes it easy enough to leave.

Let's dive in.

Psychology behind loyalty

Samuelson and Zeckhauser ran a simple experiment. They told people to imagine they'd inherited money and had to decide how to invest it (moderate-risk stocks, high-risk stocks, treasury bills, or municipal bonds). Same options for everyone.

But one group saw a neutral list. The other saw the same list with one option labeled "your current investment."

The labeled option went from being picked by 32% of people to 47%. Nothing changed except the word "current."

Most of your competitor's users are running on the same autopilot. They're not staying because the product is great. They're staying because all their stuff is in there and leaving feels like work.

Behavioral researchers call this status quo bias. But you don't need the term. You just need to know: the biggest barrier between your competitor's users and your product is the perceived hassle of leaving. Not features. Not brand love. Hassle.

And hassle is something you can engineer away.

How it shows in user behavior

Three questions run through someone's head before they leave (or don’t) a competitor for you.

1. "Do I have to rebuild everything from scratch?"

If switching feels like starting over, people won't start, even when your product is obviously better.

Your competitor's users have settings. Schedules. Integrations. Workflows they spent weeks dialing in. Their brain codes all of that as investment.

Losses hurt roughly twice as much as gains feel good. So "our product is better" is a gain. "You'll lose your setup" is a loss. The loss wins every time.

2."Can I actually afford to say no to this deal?"

When your pricing is structurally different from the competitor's, you change the whole equation.

There's a gap between "we're 20% cheaper" and "you'll never pay again."

A discount makes people think. A one-time lifetime price makes people act. You're not just saving them money — you're wiping out an entire category of cost.

3."What if it doesn't work and I can't go back?"

People don't fear switching. They fear it being a one-way door.

Inman and Zeelenberg studied this directly in a 2002 Journal of Consumer Research paper. Consumers anticipate more regret from switching to something new than from sticking with a repeat purchase. Action feels riskier than inaction. But here's the key finding: when people had a clear justification for the switch, that regret dropped significantly. A good reason to leave made leaving feel safe.

That's what free trials, money-back guarantees, and refund windows actually do. They give someone permission to act by removing the "what if I'm stuck" fear.

How to Turn It Around

Back to my Calendly story.

I'd been paying $10/month for two years. The tool was fine. I had my availability set up, my meeting types configured, Zoom connected, booking link everywhere. Classic autopilot.

Then TidyCal showed up, and here’s how they won me.

1. First, they built a direct Calendly import.

I exported my schedule, uploaded it, and my availability, meeting types, and settings came with me. I didn't rebuild anything. I didn't re-enter my Monday-through-Friday blocks one at a time. Five minutes, done.

2. Second, the pricing. $29 once versus $120/year.

Less than three months of what I was already spending, and then nothing, forever. TidyCal doesn’t cover all of Calendly's features. But for my use case (booking calls with clients and prospects) that's 99% of what I actually need.

3. 60-day refund window

Try it for two months, and if you hate it, get your $29 back. Compare that to being locked into a Calendly annual plan mid-cycle. The risk is almost comically low.

TidyCal didn't try to out-feature Calendly. They attacked the switching costs instead. Three walls down, and a two-year customer walked out the door in five minutes.

Loved the issue? Be cool, share with colleagues

If you forget everything, remember this:

Don't just build a better product than your competitor. Build a better exit ramp from theirs.

🎉 Woow, you finished the issue, that’s awesome!

Hi, I’m Anastasia Kudrow, and I write Ghosted.

I am also a product growth consultant. I help SaaS teams apply psychology and PLG to build growth they can actually control. I run my own project, Growing Pains, and also work with one of the leading PLG consulting agencies, ProductLed, led by Wes Bush.

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-kudrow/

Or check out my website, maybe we can work together: https://www.growingpains.consulting/

See you next week!