🪄 Peak End Rule (with Real Life Examples)

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 20th issue.

Today's topics:

1. Peak End Rule

2. A top fucking secret on Growth Hacking

3. One recommended video on The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory

Peak End Rule

People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.

We tend to evaluate experiences by combining just 2 key moments:

1. The Peak - the most intense point, either maximally positive or negative

2. The End - how the experience culminated and finished

Our minds use this shortcut of just considering the peak and end rather than thinking about every moment.

The reason we do this is because it makes judging experiences cognitively easier on our brain.

1. The Cold Water Study

A trial was conducted where participants had to submerge their hand in 14°C cold water for 60 seconds

Then another trial was conducted where the same participants had to keep their hand in 14°C water for 60 seconds, followed by 30 more seconds in 15°C water.

If you had to guess which trial would they prefer to go through again?

Think.

First trial, right?

Wrong.

Participants preferred the second, longer trial because it ended less painfully, despite being in cold water for longer overall, i.e, 90 seconds instead of 60 seconds.

If the ending is good, everything is good.

2. The Medical Procedure Study

Researcher Danny Kahneman and his colleagues conducted another set of experiments with painful experiences.

This example involves two patients, A and B, undergoing a colonoscopy procedure which was painful at the time the study was conducted in the 1990s.

The patients were asked to report their level of pain every 60 seconds during the procedure.

Patient B's colonoscopy was longer in duration than Patient A's. And both patients experienced the same level of pain.

However, researchers extended the procedure of Patient B so that it ended a bit less painfully.

Now despite being in pain longer overall, patients B preferred and were more willing to repeat the extended procedure with the less painful ending.

They even wrote a paper titled "When More Pain Is Preferred To Less: Adding A Better End."

3. Rollercoaster

Rollercoaster Rides in an Amusement Park last 5 minutes but you have to stand in the boring line for 50 minutes.

You often forget the long boring wait in the queue and primarily remember the excitement and thrill of the ride itself, especially its most intense moments and the end.

4. Starbucks

Starbucks trains all its employees on the Peak End Rule.

They will welcome you, treat you well, smile at you, and often open the door while you are leaving making you visit the cafe again.

5. Movies

Think about the best movies you've seen, its often those that have peak moments somewhere in the middle and the ending is great.

That's why the greatest movies often concentrate on the end to increase the rewatch and recall value.

Mindfuck movies do this well.

Think Coherence, Intimate Strangers, A Tale Of Two Sisters, The Sixth Sense, and The Good, The Bad, The Weird.

6. Relationships

You can use Peak End Rule in any kind of conversations like the ones with your boss or your spouse or investors.

For example, if you are doing a presentation to raise funding, you have to make sure to give investors the peak and make the end note a high.

This works even on dates.

If you want to impress someone on the 1st date, give them a peak and make the end high.

7. Business

IKEA's $1 ice cream at the exit leaves customers with a positive final impression, potentially overshadowing any negative experiences during their shopping.

Disneyland spends millions in incredible firework shows with heart warming music just before they close the park.

They know that you will soon forget the incredibly long lines, overpriced merchandise, sore feet, etc...

And all that will remain is that last memory when everything was magical if only for that brief moment.

And you will keep coming back for more.

A secret collection on Growth Hacking

Top Fucking Secret is a website with a collection of Underground Growth Hat Tactics.

Earlier it used to be an Unlisted Playlist but it now redirects to a YouTube channel.

If you want to understand how Growth Hacking really works, watch all the videos on this channel.

One recommended video on The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory

The father of Behavioral Economics Daniel Kahneman describes in this video the gap between our experiencing selves and our remembering selves.

For an average American, the magic number is $60,000/year. Anything beyond that doesn't have massive implications for your happiness. Its a flat line.

Highly recommend watching the video as it covers Peak End Rule from the researcher himself.

In fact, this newsletter has a new section Startup Of The Day for the same reason.

Tweet of the day

Rabbit Holes

1. How Spotify Turned Free Music into a $10+ Billion Valuation - Spotify made sharing .mp3 files a thing of past. Learn how it grew so fast.

2. The Truth About Social Media Engagement Pods - Every Social Media Influencer uses Engagement Pods to grow their following. If they don't, their growth halts at a standstill. Reason why 100k followers get very little engagement.

3. How I Reached 35k Reddit Karma by Automating 120+ Posts Per Month - Starterstory grew on top of Reddit's /r/Entrepreneur. They hated the guy so much that they petitioned to ban him. Best part? He automated his Reddit posts.

Startup of the day

Turboscribe AI is a simple wrapper around OpenAI's Whisper that does one thing well.

It transcribes your videos to subtitle (.srt) files.

For $20/month, you receive unlimited transcriptions.

The good thing about SaaS like this is most people will underuse their subscription and some will overuse it in which case you can add a Fair Use policy in your Terms Of Service.

But it is a very simple SaaS idea that scales well.

The only thing this product needs is distribution.

You don't need to add many features to this SaaS. Its a one-and-done SaaS idea where most of the work is done by OpenAI's Whisper.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Power of Good Domains (LINK)

2. Startups making Millions (LINK)

3. A Database of 486 Million Public Linkedin Profiles (LINK)

Disclosure: Everything said in this post is for educational purposes only. Please follow the law. By reading this post, you accept full responsibility for your actions.