How to Write A/B Test Hypotheses That Actually Hold Up
A practitioner's guide to writing A/B test hypotheses — the structure that survives review, the three failure modes that produce inconclusive tests, and how…
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Writing · Lean Experiments
Revenue-First
Revenue-First
Experimentation
Practical A/B testing frameworks, behavioral science, and conversion optimization — for growth leaders responsible for revenue.
Regression to the Mean: Why A/B Test Wins Fade After Launch
The most dangerous SaaS test win is the one that looks clean, gets shipped fast, and fades a month later. I've seen teams forecast revenue off a headline
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The Commitment Trap: Why Forcing Users to Opt-In Destroys Conversions (and What Loss Aversion Actually Predicts)
An experiment requiring users to actively opt-in to autopay during plan selection caused a 15-20% drop in conversions.
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The Six-Figure Decision: How Strategic Price De-Emphasis Reveals the True Economics of Attention
When a consumer subscription business reduced the visual prominence of pricing during a high-price market period, conversions jumped 12-15% and generated…
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Behavioral Economics in Marketing: 10 Tactics Tested
Behavioral economics in marketing works best as hypothesis generation. Examine 10 tactics, their evidence, failure conditions, and what marketers should test.
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7 Real-World Examples of the Door-in-the-Face Technique (And When It Backfires)
Real examples of the door-in-the-face technique in marketing and sales - how the contrast principle drives compliance, and when the tactic backfires.
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Retail A/B Testing Isn't Broken — Your Prioritization Is
Walk into most retail optimization programs and you'll find the same thing: a backlog of tests that all feel urgent, a dashboard celebrating win rates that
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The Retail Experiment That Most Stores Are Running Wrong
Walk the floor of almost any retail operation running A/B tests, and you'll notice the same pattern: the tests are neat, the hypotheses are tidy, and the
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Retail A/B Testing Is Not the Same Game as SaaS Testing — and Most Playbooks Pretend It Is
Walk into any major retail site and look at how many decisions a shopper makes before completing a purchase. Product discovery. Filtering. Comparison. Sizing.
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The URGENT Trap: Why Smart People Spend Their Time on the Wrong Things
Zhu, Yang, and Hsee documented the Mere Urgency Effect in 2018 — subjects systematically chose objectively worse-rewarded tasks when those tasks were…
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The Endowment Effect Goes Bad: Where Behavioral Economics Crosses Into Manipulation
Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler's 1990 Cornell mug experiment proved that ownership roughly doubles perceived value.
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The Most Underrated Force in Marketing: What Subliminal Lipton Proved About the Mere Exposure Effect
Robert Zajonc's 1968 paper documented that humans like things more the more often they see them, even when the things are meaningless squiggles.
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The Anti-Apple: How Ron Johnson Took the Apple Playbook to JCPenney and Burned $1 Billion in 17 Months
In 2011, JCPenney hired the executive who'd built Apple's retail empire to do the same for them.
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The Goodbye You Forgot to Design: Why Most Brands Abandon Customers Right After the Sale
Festinger's 1957 cognitive dissonance research showed that the moment after purchase is when customers are most psychologically vulnerable.
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The 1¢ Problem: How Costco's Free Samples, Hare Krishna Flowers, and a 1924 Baby Ruth Airdrop All Use the Same Behavioral Trick
Dan Ariely's MIT candy experiment showed 257% more foot traffic when truffles cost zero instead of one cent.
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Twenty-Four Miles Up: How Red Bull Bought an Entire Category for $30 Million
On October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner free-fell 24 miles from the edge of space in front of 8 million live YouTube viewers, with Red Bull's logo on his helmet.
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Winston's Star: The Five-Element Framework MIT's AI Director Used to Make Ideas Memorable
For thirty years Patrick Winston gave a single lecture at MIT called 'How to Speak.' His central claim: the packaging of an idea matters more than its content.
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The $2 Billion Misread: How Three Compounding Biases Killed Quibi in Seven Months
Katzenberg and Whitman raised $1.75 billion before writing a line of code. Quibi launched in April 2020 and shut down by October.
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What If We Designed Cities Like Movies? A Skeptical Read on Cinematic Urbanism at SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026
Four practitioners at SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 proposed designing cities the way you'd design a movie.
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The Blemishing Effect: How Mini Cooper Won America by Admitting Its Biggest Flaw
When the Mini Cooper relaunched in the United States in 2002, the marketing didn't hide the car's size — it made the smallness the entire campaign.
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The Lollapalooza Effect: How Amazon Stacks Twelve Behavioral Biases Into Every Checkout
Charlie Munger's most useful idea wasn't about investing — it was that behavioral biases compound non-linearly when stacked.
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The False Consensus Effect: Why Smart People Build Products Nobody Wants
In 1977, Lee Ross at Stanford asked students if they'd wear a sandwich board on campus.
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The New Coke Lesson: Why What Customers Say in Surveys Has Almost Nothing to Do With What They Buy
In 1985, Coca-Cola ran 191,000 blind taste tests over four years and spent $4M validating a new formula. New Coke failed catastrophically within three months.
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Cross-Industry Theft: How Apple Built Its Retail Empire by Stealing the Ritz-Carlton's Service Manual
Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson didn't benchmark Best Buy when designing the Apple Store.
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