In partnership with
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 👇
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
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.
