Sales of a chicken noodle soup increased 21.1% when people were shown the costs of making it. The effect works for most products.
When your project isn’t making money
It might be that you’re losing money on every sale (Which means that each and every item you sell, every service you perform, costs you money. Bigger won’t make you better…) Becau…
SaaS Pricing: Lessons from 4 pricing changes - Canny Blog
We launched Canny almost a year ago. During that time, we reached ramen profitability. We also changed our pricing four times. Here's a deep dive into each pricing change and the lessons we learned.
Targeted Promotions on an E-Book Platform: Crowding Out, Heterogeneity, and Opportunity Costs
Targeted promotions based on individual purchase history can increase sales. However, the opportunity costs of targeting to optimize promoted product sales are poorly understood. A series of randomized field experiments with a large e-book platform shows that although targeted promotions increase promoted product sales and purchases of similar products, they can crowd out purchases of dissimilar products (i.e., e-books from nontargeted genres) by decreasing search activities of nontargeted goods on the same platform. The effects on total sales are heterogeneous, ranging from net decreases to insignificant drops, motivating a targeting exercise comparing strategies that optimize promoted product sales versus total sales. Targeting for promoted product sales tends to assign promotions to customers who purchased similar products, whereas targeting for total sales assigns promotions on the basis of other user characteristics. Targeting for promoted product sales generated incremental total sales that amounted to approximately 29% of the optimal incremental total sales when targeting for total sales (an opportunity cost of 71%). The optimal targeting exercise highlights how maximizing promotional lift can incur opportunity costs in terms of other forgone sales.
Why free stuff makes us irrational
When something is free, people feel a positive glow — and standard cost-benefit analyses go out the window.
Jevons paradox
In economics, the Jevons paradox, or Jevons effect, is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. Greater efficiency reduces the amount of the resource needed per application, lowering its effective cost; if demand is sufficiently price elastic, this induces demand, frequently resulting in a net increase of total resource consumption.
How to Meal Prep Chicken...if you hate meal prepping.
Pricing Your Product
A lot of startups treat pricing as a math problem or, worse, an afterthought. Pricing is as much an art as it is a science, one that relies as much on marketing and psychology as it does on classical economics.
Chicken Market: Season 3 Retro
season 3 closed on 2026-07-12. final: net -$43.27, rank 18/18, gap to first $1336.40. worth the full ledger before season 4 (already underway, day 1/7) buries...
What's Advertising Content Worth? Evidence from a Consumer Credit Marketing Field Experiment<sup>*</sup>
Abstract. Firms spend billions of dollars developing advertising content, yet there is little field evidence on how much or how it affects demand. We analy
“You Will:” A Macroeconomic Analysis of Digital Advertising
Abstract. An information-based model is developed where traditional and digital advertising finance the provision of free media goods and affect price comp
Double Mental Discounting: When a Single Price Promotion Feels Twice as Nice
This research finds that when a single gain has strong associations with multiple costs, consumers often mentally deduct that gain from perceived costs multiple times. For example, with some price promotions (e.g., spend $200 now and receive a $50 gift card to spend in the future), consumers mentally deduct the value of the price promotion from the cost of the first purchase when they receive the promotion, as well as from the cost of the second purchase when they use the promotion. Multiple mental deductions based on a single gain result in consumers' perceptions that their costs are lower than they actually are, which can trigger higher expenditures. This mental accounting phenomenon, referred to as “double mental discounting,” is driven by the extent to which gains feel associated, or coupled, with multiple purchases. This article also documents methods to decouple promotional gains from purchases, thus mitigating double mental discounting.
The Effects of Financial Incentives in Experiments: A Review and Capital-Labor-Production Framework
We review 74 experiments with no, low, or high performance-based financial incentives. The modal result has no effect on mean performance (though variance is usually reduced by higher payment). Higher incentive does improve performance often, typically judgment tasks that are responsive to better effort. Incentives also reduce “presentation” effects (e.g., generosity and risk-seeking). Incentive effects are comparable to effects of other variables, particularly “cognitive capital” and task “production” demands, and interact with those variables, so a narrow-minded focus on incentives alone is misguided. We also note that no replicated study has made rationality violations disappear purely by raising incentives.
How repositioning a product allows you to 8x its price
You can charge much more than you think, if you reposition your value-proposition. Here's how.
The Ultimate Guide to Get Results With Social Proof Marketing
Not all social proof is created equally. The types of social proof that work in one situation might not work in another. With this guide, you'll learn how to use Social proof in your marketing strategy and boost your sales thanks to what other people have to say about your products.
The Ultimate Guide to Get Results With Social Proof Marketing
Not all social proof is created equally. The types of social proof that work in one situation might not work in another. With this guide, you'll learn how to use Social proof in your marketing strategy and boost your sales thanks to what other people have to say about your products.
How to Hire a Great Marketing Person - Noah Kagan
I got this question asked and figured others might be curious on how I do it. The challenge about marketing output is that it’s not always numbers based and the ROI isn’t immediate. With that being said I think it can be and here’s how I would solve how to find and how to know […]
