🪄 Labor Perception Bias

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 127th issue.

Today's topics:

1. Labor Perception Bias

2. A tool to Change Written Tone For Professional Communication

3. One recommended video on AI-Powered Marketing to Get More Leads and Customers with HyperGrowth Partners

Labor Perception Bias

People trust and value things more when they see the underlying work that went into it. This is why faster isn't always better.

The story goes like this:

“The huge printing presses of a major Chicago newspaper began malfunctioning on the Saturday before Christmas, putting all the revenue for advertising that was to appear in the Sunday paper in jeopardy. None of the technicians could track down the problem. Finally, a frantic call was made to the retired printer who had worked with these presses for over 40 years. “We’ll pay anything; just come in and fix them,” he was told.

When he arrived, he walked around for a few minutes, surveying the presses; then he approached one of the control panels and opened it. He removed a dime from his pocket, turned a screw 1/4 of a turn, and said, "The presses will now work correctly." After being profusely thanked, he was told to submit a bill for his work.

The bill arrived a few days later, for $10,000.00! Not wanting to pay such a huge amount for so little work, the printer was told to please itemize his charges, with the hope that he would reduce the amount once he had to identify his services. The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.”

Imagine if you go to a restaurant and order a complex dish. And the waiter goes inside the kitchen and brings the dish within a minute of you ordering it. You would get suspicious about it, wouldn't you? I would think it was already made.

Food critics rated the quality of food as 22% higher when they could watch it being prepared, compared to when they were served dishes that had already been plated.

This is one reason why payments app like Wise show a loading screen when a payment is done.

Normally, you wouldn't see the screen above. You would see the below screen directly. But when it comes to payments, you don't want users to feel like the payment isn't being sent.

You can observe the same thing in any payment app across the world. They show a slow loading screen to show labor is being done.

People dislike waiting in general, but if your users have high expectations (for example, money transaction, migration, analysis, reporting), then they become skeptical if the waiting time is too short. That's why displaying a labor screen right after a key action can improve the User Experience.

A well-designed effect can increase your app’s perceived value by up to 15% according to a research by Harvard Business School.

A related concept to Labor Perception Bias is Labor Illusion. Consumers perceive a product more favourably if they can see the effort that went into it. So you can create the illusion of the work being done to improve the UX in the consumers mind.

Headshot Pro, a $2m per year AI Photography Service, takes 2 hours to return the photos. Just like a real photoshoot. They use AI on the backend to give labor illusion.

When searching for airlines online, you see animated searches for flight to give you the impression of a computer sifting through thousands of airfares just to find the best one for you.

In fact, Danny Postma, founder of Headshot Pro, gave a business idea on Greg Isenberg's Startup Ideas Podcast that will be done in the next 2 years using Labor Illusion.

He gave the idea of an AI marketing agency that is completely ran on AI without people knowing it.

He has a domain name called Headline99 that he wanted to create a service for. The service would just write headlines for people with landing pages for $99.

The process goes like this:

1. Send people a questionnaire to fill in all the details about the company

2. Have a bunch of different LLMs (OpenAI's ChatGPT, Claude's Sonnet, Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama) summarize it

3. Make 5-10 different headlines based on a few copywriting frameworks

4. Finally, put a human in the loop that literally picks the best 3 headlines

It makes sense as Harry Dry says in Marketing Examples:

Doubling traffic requires enormous effort but doubling the conversion only takes a few small tweaks.

No small business making $30,000 per month wants to pay $5,000 for a fully automated service. Because they aren't used to that kind of pricing. Positioning it as a service-based business with humans involved makes them pay a lot more due to labor illusion.

And you can scale this to infinity.

With the tools available right now, you can do this easily.

A tool to Change Written Tone For Professional Communication

Tone Changer is a simple web app that changes text tone so you can change it from casual communication to professional communication.

The UI/UX of this is brilliant.

One recommended video on AI-Powered Marketing to Get More Leads and Customers with HyperGrowth Partners

This video covers real-world AI use cases in marketing.

For example, their goal was to get 10% of US Advertisers to advertise on Reddit. So they used Clay to scrape Meta, LinkedIn and Google Ad Libraries to find the top Advertisers on those platforms. Because if someone spends money on advertising on one platform, they are more open to spending it on another platform. This workflow beat the 200-person SDR team's performance in less than 2 months.

Highly recommend watching this one as it shows the demo and gives more career advice on which roles will be dead soon.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

In a year, there will be a tool to create Landing Pages insanely fast.

It takes an hour or so for now with tools that use AI but it should be done in 5-10 minutes.

2/

Deepfakes are here.

3/

You can get insane amount of public data using Google's Own Cache. For example, B2B Data from LinkedIn.

Rabbit Holes

1. Building vs. Betting - There are times when you should be a builder and there are times when you should be an investor. This post makes a clear difference between both.

2. I have gained 300M views on tiktok in the last year. AMA - TIL you can make more money on TikTok making videos of you working at a Target than working at a Target. $10,000 per month for 10-20 minutes of work per day is insane.

3. Venture Scale - When you should go for VC money, explained.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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Read all the old case studies here.

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1. Riverside FM's Dwell Time Using Free Transcription Service (LINK)

2. Amazon's Secret For Customer Loyalty (LINK)

3. Unethical Growth Hacks used by Startups in their Early Days (LINK)