Sales happen when buyers fear missing out | Hacker News Reader

Sales happen when buyers fear missing out

tidyfirst.substack.com

251 pointsetrvic124 comments

> Sales don’t happen when benefits exceed price. I did not know this.

Obviously the title and opening sentence aren’t meant to be taken literally or absolutely despite being phrased that way, since the author had sales before discovering FOMO as a strategy, and also since these statements aren’t true for all products. I can buy that FOMO helps sell a newsletter subscription where it’s hard to communicate value in the first place, and people are used to newsletters being free. FOMO isn’t what drives McDonald’s or gasoline or breakfast cereal though. Most things I purchase aren’t based on FOMO, but maybe a few optional things are here and there.

I found the “ads eww” comment to be funny when what the author has discovered is an advertising technique, and one of the very techniques that earns and engenders the ‘eww’. Manipulating people works, but people don’t like knowing they’re being manipulated, especially if claims about missing out or about scarcity are inauthentic.

Well put! I don’t see anything in there that’s a rejoinder to “ads ew” necessarily, tho; if there’s some actual scarcity then telling people about it is not advertising (marketing!) at all, but rather the job of an index, a search engine, a catalog, a govt PSA, etc.

I don’t think there’s a single argument for advertising other than “manipulation can make individuals rich, and what’s good for the rich is good for society”. Which isn’t a very popular one to say out loud these days, especially in “woke” advertising giants like Google and LinkedIn…

> “ads eww”

I thought this was about Ads that AdBlocker was made for. I don't think they'll have turn a good ROI for a substack audience though.

I sold a book (https://howtoopensource.dev/) and did a *very* soft launch which performed so poorly I spent the next 6-9months building out full blown launch strategy.

FOMO is used a lot as the term du-jour but it goes deeper than that: a sense of urgency. We relate FOMO to urgency because a lot of FOMO happens around events (missing a concert or conference, for example) but to me the key isn’t the fear, it’s the urgency.

For my eventual launch I read a book aptly titled “Launch” which talks at length about building a sense of urgency, turning the sale into an event, and generating excitement. I offered a limited time, exclusive incentive with a hard deadline and it worked very well. That hits the fear and the urgency.

From Kent:

> How can I communicate what the company is missing out on

While framed as FOMO, to me it’s good old value-proposition marketing. The book I linked above recommends focusing on a customer “transformation” story. Try to get potential customers to imagine what life would be like if ONLY they had your product. From this lens the FOMO is fear of missing out on being your best/better self.

This part of my launch was really difficult. I wanted to talk about what the book teaches, how it stacks up against other books, why my petagogy is useful. It didn’t seem like my book would “turn a coder into a contributor” (by itself). But that’s exactly the outcome I wanted, and it’s the outcome my customers wanted. So, that’s how I sold it.

> While framed as FOMO, to me it’s good old value-propositioned marketing.

Right! Exactly, the value proposition is stating what you think the value is to the consumer, and when it aligns with what they really value then sales occur. The author made a clear distinction saying, “I naively assumed that people transacted when value exceeded price. I blindly pursued adding more value to this newsletter.” He’s talking about value from his own perspective rather than value from the customer’s perspective, like you did with listing the subjects and teaching methods in your book.

I’ve made the same mistake trying to add what I think is valuable and talk about what I think is valuable, and have it lead to low sales, so I know from experience that good marketing is necessary and that good marketing can be difficult for engineers to learn, and that building it does not mean that they will come and buy it. Part of what I’m saying is you have to really understand the eww of advertising, why it’s there, where it comes from, and how to use it properly, and you have to be careful and figure out what the difference is between showing someone the value and lying to them, because sometimes the line is very gray and/or very thin.

> It didn’t seem like my book would “turn a coder into a contributor” (by itself). But that’s exactly the outcome I wanted, and it’s the outcome my customers wanted. So, that’s how I sold it.

Am I misreading your post or are bragging about selling your product by lying about what it can can do.

> bragging about selling your product by lying about what it can can do

Is there a billionaire past or present who didn't use this strategy?

Why is that relevant?

I don't think we should be looking at billionaires as examples of how to conduct ourselves.

(general perspective here, not specific of the exact case). It could be that _no_ book will be sufficient for that outcome. Because a book might not be the right tool. One might need to practice, get out there and actually do things. If so, it can be ethical to sell that it is a part of getting to the outcome wanted. Especially if one provides tips&tricks for the beyond-the-book part. Those kinds of things will be be great candidates for content marketing, or even small giveaways (commoditize your compliment), or partnering to offer the other parts of the package.

That's far from lying. The book needs the reader engagement to be effective.

“What can it do?” if we are talking ceilings, then yes the book has successfully helped coders become contributors. I have several readers who got maintainer status on libraries after reading the book.

Now, is it guaranteed to do that for everyone? No.

If you view my marketing page, I’m curious what your thoughts and how it could be better.

I want to sell the upside but not over sell it. If you buy the book and never open it, it won’t help get any little green squares on GitHub.

> FOMO isn’t what drives McDonald’s or gasoline or breakfast cereal though.

All three of those examples use FOMO to drive more sales though. Limited time offerings like the McRib/Happy Meal toys, “last gas for 100 miles”, and even cereals being “part of a balanced breakfast” (despite all the problems with that statement) are designed to trigger FOMO.

It’s not the only strategy employed, but it is employed.

Last gas for 100 miles is a safety issue in remote areas, it doesn’t drive significant gas sales, the signs are generally put up by the state not the gas stations, so that’s not an example of FOMO advertising. Neither is “part of a balanced breakfast”. That’s advertising, absolutely, but not a FOMO strategy.

McDonald’s is using it sometimes, you’re right. I was originally thinking of basic items, burger and fries, but they do have seasonal items and limited time specials, so I’ll grant you that one and stand corrected.

> Manipulating people works, but people don’t like knowing they’re being manipulated

Agree. The best salesmen I've met have never overtly tried to sell me anything. They've been very knowledgeable about the product and they're much more having a conversation rather than throwing a sales pitch.

Does this apply equally when selling (1) a known quantity for which a budget line item exists and (2) a product in a new category, like is often the case with startups?

My answer would be yes. But the latter is incredibly difficult. You need to sell the idea (and it's related emotions and usefulness) in addition to the product.

Any tips/books/etc.?

Collectibles are entirely based on that. In fact, I'd say they're defined by it -- if there's little chance of missing out on something, then that thing isn't a collectible. How big of a role this plays (and sustainably so) in other kinds of goods is less clear, although discount sales are exactly about creating this kind of fear -- or, conversely, rare opportunity -- and they do work. Regularly scheduled sales, on the other hand, work more by creating a price differentiation, where people to whom a product is worth less than the regular retail price can choose to wait.

I think there are other reasons disconnected from that.

I've bought "collectible" things out of nostalgia, for instance. And others because they are just cool.

Look at edmunds drinking bird. or an sts-8 flight cover.

I think all the reasons can play a part but may weigh differently for different people.

Most sales, especially within IT, is about trust.

Scaring a customer into buying with “fear of missing out” and you risk push them even longer away.

They key with many of these manipulative sales techniques is that they are on rare purchases for which the buyer has little knowledge. Most people don't buy homes, cars, mattresses, with any regularity so whatever badwill you generate will be irrelevant 10-20 years down the line and likely born by a different seller.

Like healthcare, it's hard to treat individual private buyers as an efficient market. Housing has become more like NFTs and memestonks (It can only go up!)... which is true until it isn't and everything goes down. Supporting prices through leverage and regulatory control is now so ingrained that it's hard to do price discovery. (edit: strangely, like memecoins you can actually overbuild a lot of housing like in China and keep prices going up for up to a decade out of sheer buyer momentum)

> Most people don't buy homes, cars, mattresses, with any regularity so whatever badwill you generate will be irrelevant 10-20 years down the line and likely born by a different seller.

One scummy trick in that area is owning multiple brands. My understanding is the appliance market is very consolidated (basically 2 main players own almost all the brands). They've carefully maintained the separate identities of the brands they acquired, even as they consolidated design/production, so any "badwell" they create will have a good chance of just causing the customer to switch to another one of their products.

There probably should be some kind of "reverse-trademark" law that requires companies to maintain only one brand in a product area. Trademark is about allowing them to protect their reputation from bad actors, and my "reverse-trademark" would protect consumers from using multiple trademarks to avoid the consequences of a bad reputation.

Business customers are extremely conservative. They are fine with missing out. They have fear of getting in, not fear of missing out.

A really good point. And, you have to think about budget levels. If you have a product and it is 50k, and you pursue a FOMO strategy, remember that you need to convince dozens of people inside the organization that they will miss out. The half life for a FOMO conversation isn't great, one advocate inside the organization might be captivated but when they send the email to the next person, they won't feel it and will sabotage the deal.

If you are selling something under $10k, then you can often get one person with budget approval up to $10k to buy it on a whim, and that's much easier. But that actual level is hard to figure out.

All that being said, your point feels like it could be restated to say they care a lot more about protecting their jobs. And, it is really strong right now.

>Most sales, especially within IT, is about trust.

Our CIO ordered us to switch away from VMware when Broadcom made changes to the licenses. We are a mid-sized company with 1500+ employees. If I remember correctly, Broadcom anticipated some customers would switch away, but they could still profit more from their larger customers.

My friend works at a bank. They switched from Azure to Google Cloud because Microsoft's prices "didn't make sense" to them.

trust is a key in IT.

Another anecdote to this:

Where I work currently they won’t move off AWS because the relationship is really good and the support has been good (so I’ve been told) and they have had the relationship for quite some time so even though we could get better pricing with GCP or switching some things to more specialized yet reliable vendors we default to AWS for almost everything because the relationship is seen as solid and trustworthy with history to back it up

Doesn’t mean we don’t get quotes from other providers in negotiations at contract renewal time and use frameworks / technologies that allow us to switch vendors pretty easily if we needed and I know there is an upper limit here. However it’s also one of those “we pay a little more for peace of mind and familiarity” things, so it’s with some (relatively marginal) higher cost

Most IT are cost centres and there is pressure from CFO/CEO to shift to a more cost-effective option when there are cost lines that are 7-8 digits long. Companies also regularly do the math on when the added pain of doing the lift and shift is actually worthwhile, compared to paying whatever bloated rate they're being charged at that moment.

Hmm, I worked for a large e-commerce company and they basically faked the red hot "Only 5 items left!" warnings to drive sales with technical mumbo jumbo in the small print.

Did not seem to negatively impact their sales after all... probably same mechanics on Booking.com etc. with hotel rooms.

That is not within IT, and more into commerce. Booking.com already have the trust, and the customers can be scared with the FOMO

Sure. And a furniture store near me while I was growing up had a "going out of business" sale for over 15 years. There are plenty of people who aren't paying attention to these sorts of things, and there are plenty of sketchy businesses that take advantage of that.

I have a sort of life rule about being sold to -- if anyone is saying/implying that I need to make a purchasing decision quickly, my decision will always be to not make the purchase. There's no such thing as "act now or you lose" in the wider marketplace.

Whenever I negotiate prices with SaaS companies they give you a price and then they say this offer is valid x weeks – and "after that we cant guarantee the price". And I always reply the same thing, "I'm in no hurry – let's see what the price is next time. If it differs greatly then I can not trust you, and it's better to find out now than in two years when we are locked in to your product."

There isn't necessarily any malice intended; nobody is going to give you a price and honour it forever. Any quotes I do in my micro-ISV are valid for 1 month - not because I'm likely to change the price, but simply because I have no control over things like currency exchange rates and energy prices.

But, I certainly don't use it to pressure the customer.

> If it differs greatly then I can not trust you

This is probably a bad assumption. A change in the offer price does not reflect on their trustworthiness. You’re also tricking yourself because someone wanting to lock you in down the road and raise the price won’t do it up front, they’ll do it later.

An offer price can change due to market conditions. The statement that price can’t be guaranteed is an optimistic speculation that sales or costs might jump, so you can buy now before their business increases and prices rise due to higher costs or demand. You can legitimately benefit if you buy before prices go up. You certainly can gamble that prices won’t go up, but if they do and you waited, it doesn’t mean the other party can’t be trusted, it means you lost the bet.

If you wait and get a higher price, that could even be a sign that the company is more trustworthy than if the offer doesn’t change. But of course there’s no guarantee. And ultimately there is no guarantee that when you buy a service on a limited time contract that you won’t have prices jump later when you’re ‘locked in’. It would be quite silly to not expect the renewal price later to rise for a variety of reasons, and you should have contingencies in place and be willing, able, and ready to switch providers.

I think the context here is when you signed up for a trial and you have a sales person emailing you every single day, and by the end of the week they start using the "I can only guarantee this price" bullshit. It's just an aggressive sales person trying to pressure you.

I don't know what companies you are working in, but if the service is deemed valuable enough really nobody cares about money as long as it's in the ballpark of what similar services costs. And When it comes to time, yes all projects starts with "we gonna start using this this week" but we also know it takes a year to roll out even the most basic tool in a medium sized organization so a couple of weeks here and there doesn't really make a difference either.

All that matters is if the tool seems to solve your problems – and the price is not significantly different from the competitors and having a sales person bugging you every single day telling you you need to make the decision now because otherwise who knows what might happen to the price – honestly they can just go ** themselves. I make the decision when I'm ready, and if they are deciding to significantly jack up the price in between that period they are just making themself less trustworthy.

That’s all fair. Sales people are pretty well known for skeezy tactics, some of the same stuff author was referring to with ‘ads eww’, they have an earned reputation that the nice sales people have to overcome. I guess one upside to this is untrustworthy sales people don't necessarily reflect on the trustworthiness of the business they work for. The only way to really know if you’ll get jacked once locked in is to buy and see what happens, or have a longer term contract.

To your point perhaps, one thing large organizations value above most things is predictable cost. They actually don’t want usage based pricing because it’s unpredictable and could spike, even if the usage based cost is significantly lower on average.

I tried marketing usage based pricing to companies for too long before realizing that it was a disincentive working against me and that price didn’t matter much.

> An offer price can change due to market conditions.

This is one of the primary reasons why I avoid any SaaS that I might actually come to depend on. It's a trap that is an inherent part of that model.

Exactly! Getting locked in is an inherent feature of service businesses. The trustworthiness of sales people is secondary at best.

For mature SaaS companies, this could be a function of quarter/year-end, and trying to hit targets. For smaller companies (I run one), this is more likely because they would value your business now because it helps them validate their product and get future customers. If you become a customer after they already have customers larger/more well-known than you, that value-add is nullified.

Is saying "our prices will increase in July; anyone who pays for a full year before then will be grandfathered onto the lower cost plan until 2027" a breach of trust? To me it feels like it makes me trust the company more.

Trust is the cornerstone of business to business sales because B2B relationships are long term economic relationships.

I can tell you that most of the time, buyers don’t fear missing out. Most buyers have a lot of options, and also busy lives.

Here are things that can actually make buyers buy:

  1. Social Proof / Testimonials
  2. Friends / Peer Pressure
  3. Free Trial + Structure, eg courses
  4. Access to social capital (eg celebs)
  5. Matchmaking to what they need (eg dating)
  6. Time and Data Entry Investment (quizzes, meetings)
  7. Relationships and access to Community

Now, there are a form of micro-FOMO called Impulse Buy and Group Deals. But they are organically motivated by 1 (social proof of timely notifications) 2 (group deal coming together because of friends acting) and 6 (having invested time in the search, now they will either shit or get off the pot, cause their friends are going to that thing).

I’ve spent 12 years building community software that automates all this, and now started adding AI to it.

People underestimate the role of GROUP PSYCHOLOGY in affecting what people do. That is why I have nearly gone broke (having never taken VC) building open source community software that is far more healthy and responsible. Here is the societal issues it solves:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Thanks for the info!

Okay, but if a person has already decided that they "want" a particular product (probably due to the other effects you describe), to the point that they have gone to an e-commerce website and added the product to their shopping cart — but they haven't decided to buy it at that moment, i.e. haven't checked that cart out yet, even though they've come back to the site several times since then to check on both ongoing sales, and the status of that cart... then what aspect of consumer psychology make them ultimately decide at some point to check out the cart with the item in it? And alternately, what is it that makes them ultimately decide to abandon the cart / remove the item from the cart?

FOMO is a good explanation for this, I think. Personally, there'll be times when the only reason I'm buying something now — rather than postponing the purchase indefinitely — is that if I don't, it's going to be out-of-stock for who-knows-how-long. My opportunity to choose to buy it is going to be taken away, and I literally fear missing out on the ability to make the purchase. (See Amazon's "only N left" note under some items.)

Also, sometimes, the item will suddenly go out-of-stock without any clear date for resupply — leaving me sad that I "dallied" on my choice to buy it and so did "miss out." If such an item comes back in stock, I'll usually immediately buy it, because I now realize I was taking its continued availability for granted, but no longer can — and so "need" to get it before it goes out-of-stock again.

There is a form of FOMO that can work when taught to…

Put expiration timers on ads!

Like an elevator ad.

People pay more attention when they know the ad will be gone soon, so they better click.

The only thing is that clicks don’t necessarily convert to results. So this is far better to be done for CPM ads and display ads that rotate.

Which platforms still offer CPM?

PS: combine with limited classes “filling up” during the ad so the FOMO is legit at least

I think FOMO and the first two items in your list may be the same thing.

People fear missing out on the latest thing that everyone else is doing.

The main point is YOU aren’t the one scaring them with this “fear”. It is organic elements coming from their social circle.

Testimonials and Social Proof doesnt need to instill any fear. They instill comfort. The opportunity can be available indefinitely.

Peer pressure on the other hand instills discomfort, that would resolve with making a small purchase, but again it is coming from the friends.

This is examples of NETWORK EFFECTS. They also help with lock-in. Keep this in mind: people continue to pay for something when

1) They have a problem

2) Your product can solve it

3) Every week, it costs less to pay for your product (automatically) than solving the problem themselves (eg forking your software)

I can directly contradict this from my time managing the booking (last step) page on agoda.com. One of the first things I tried was putting a countdown timer on the page: “we are holding this booking for you for five minutes. After that we’ll release it back into inventory” That produced an immediate ~1% jump in bookings.

Okay, I stand corrected. Your measurements showed an entire 1% effect!

No other experiment in the year before or after did close to as well. So yeah, a whole 1%. :-)

Presumably that was an increase like “conversions on carts older than 5 minutes went from 5% to 6%”, not “5% to 5.05%”?

ahh, from scanning down the comments, HN's Tenth Rule of Gold Spun into Green:

Any sufficiently complicated HN business analysis contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of the first year of an MBA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

FOMO is a great strategy when you are trying to sell to customers who will buy your product exactly once and then move on. Examples: collector's editions of video games, sales ahead of gift-giving holidays, tourist traps in "I am here for the one and only time I will ever be here in my life" destinations, enterprise sales to Fortune 500 companies where the buyer will get promoted by the next sales cycle. You emotionally manipulate the buyer to make the sale, the buyer regrets buying it within a day or two, and it doesn't matter because they will never talk to you again anyway.

FOMO is a horrible strategy when you expect to develop a long-term relationship with your customers. Self-respecting people won't stand for it. They will either switch to a competitor out of spite, or blow aside your transparent sales tactic and keep pressuring you downward on price during negotiations.

I disagree. For instance, let’s say I’m an auto manufacturer and I need some parts made. If I don’t get those parts, I have to stall my assembly line and lose a lot of money. If I find someone who can supply the parts in a short time frame, then I will definitely fear missing out by declining the sellers offer. If I capitulate and the seller delivers reliably, then I am going to gladly return for their services because they can ensure my business stays running.

That’s a good example but I think you’re describing another market condition called a captive market, not FOMO. In FOMO, buyers have no real risk in not buying, it’s artifice and theatrics that drive a sale. Your example is a market in which mission critical assets are sold by few and those few control all aspects of the sale. In your scenario, you’re less a mark for a salesman and more of a hostage.

It’s not a captive market. It’s a market where the buyer has a need and if they don’t have that need met, then the buyer will suffer. That’s FOMO, and that’s when sales happen. If the buyer can sit on their laurels without any negative repercussions, then they’re not going to pull the trigger until their situation changes.

Being one of the last restaurants to close for the night isn't a FOMO sales strategy.

Being the one best suited to meet your customers needs is a sales strategy. That might include staying open late if you can convince people they’re going to regret not tasting your food after a night out of drinking.

You'll get bid, but not from the best suppliers. The goods will read "and if this works out, there will be more business for you in the future" as a red flag. If they're good, they'll be busy. They don't need to grovel for one-off work. Those who will bid on FOMO work are likely not as busy. Or are used to FOMO work (and not for good reasons).

Yes FOMO in your example can motivate. The problem is, not the types you want an LTR with.

Counter point: game sales on steam. I'm their costumer for almost 20 years now, and fall for it all the time. But given how much entertainment I get from money spent, I remain a happy customer.

The trick is to make it look like an amazing opportunity, not something to fear about. The FOMO will be here, but hidden below enthusiasm, and the person will feel like they are actually lucky to have the opportunity.

As much as I'm sure many HN types would love for this to be true, it's not actually true, and it's important not to get carried away thinking "I prefer X" means "The world prefers X."

The vast majority of people are perfectly okay with FOMO as a sales tactic. This includes self-respecting, loyal, repeat customers of quality brands. Conversely, very few people are spiteful enough to go through the trouble of switching to a competitor purely out of disdain for FOMO being used as a sales tactic.

A couple examples:

- The New York Times has 10 million paying subscribers for online content. A tremendous number. Many of their sales pages feature countdown timers and phrases like "Time is running out" and "Offer won't last."

- Pretty much any clothing brand. For example, rare Nike shoe drops. People are willing to spend hundreds of dollars, wake up at ridiculous hours, and stand in line for hours, for FOMO-driven clothing sales. And far from driving people away from the brand, doing this increases people's loyalty to the brand, because FOMO works on social proof.

I’m not sure. There is certainly a group of people that is okay with it, but I’m not sure how big it is in percentages. Sometimes I suspect these strategies might make numbers go up in the short term but you end up in a spiral of less caring customers gives less meaningful connection gives less caring customers until your brand name is nonexistent. Like some big company who is finding some kind of average bland customers, but leave the door wide open for incumbents who provide better quality for a similar price.

There could be both.

I very much identify with the self respecting type your parent describes and try my best to 'punish' sellers who try silly FOMO tactics, by demoting them into oblivion in my books. However, I am still prone to some FOMO with proven, trusted brands.

Anecdote: Several years ago I happened to try out a certain brand of shoes and loved the quality and style and have ever since only bought that brand and have even introduced friends and family members to it. However, I still wait for their deals to show up before picking up a pair and am vulnerable to their "time running out" campaigns. I click "Buy", assured that at least I won't be stuck with a substandard product.

I like to think that if I ever build a product, I would focus on quality and attract the kind of customer I myself am and would never stoop to the lowly FOMO tactics, even for assured short term gains.

I need shoes. What’s the brand?

Isn't any seasonal sale FOMO-based, in that sense?

Yes.

Given that many seasonal sales are advertised with the exact phrase "Don't miss out", yes they are.

Salers playing on FOMO doesn't mean it works though.

You have the same situation with time limited sales on Amazon for instance. It should be rising your FOMO to the roof, but as a consumer you know there will be another sale in 2 month, or really it could be any day, and if you were to miss this sale on an item you wanted, you'd just wait for the next sale.

On the other side, Nike shoes actually disappear from the line up. There's models that were functionally different that I regret not stock-piling when they were still in production. And they were not marketed as exclusives or limited, they just got discontinued. It's not FOMO, it's actual time scarcity.

> It should be rising your FOMO to the roof, but as a consumer you know there will be another sale in 2 month, or really it could be any day, and if you were to miss this sale on an item you wanted, you'd just wait for the next sale.

Price trackers (apps and browser plugins) crowd source scrape prices and can show you the price history on a chart so you see the sales and how frequent they are and when they happen. Sometime soon I expect there may be a push to have laws that require price history transparency since if the price triples the old positive reviews may no longer apply and should not be showcased as if they do.

Yes. Price history is of course a nice to have.

Otherwise for anything that doesn't need reputability and/or are seen as near consumables, I think people just grab whatever's on sale and go on with their life. When there is no real differentiator from the start, it's hard to have FOMO about a specific item only available for a limited period.

> - The New York Times has 10 million paying subscribers for online content. A tremendous number. Many of their sales pages feature countdown timers and phrases like "Time is running out" and "Offer won't last."

I'm a NYT subscriber in spite of their sleazy sales and retention tactics, not because of them. The product is reputable and unique enough that they get away with sales tactics that would otherwise be a turn off.

> FOMO is a horrible strategy when you expect to develop a long-term relationship with your customers. Self-respecting people won't stand for it.

I’ve signed up for museum memberships because of a specific event that required it, or because I got a call reminding me of losing some benefit or announcing some made-up deadline for a matching contribution. I have long-term relationship with them. But I really don’t care enough to act without a nudge.

> will either switch to a competitor out of spite

This doesn’t sound like a personality that will remain with power or wealth for a long time. Controlled spite can be effective, reputationally. Random spite never is.

> FOMO is a horrible strategy when you expect to develop a long-term relationship with your customers

Based on my experience with Kickstarters (especially board game Kickstarters), as long as you actually deliver the product that you said you're going to, there's no negative consequences to using FOMO.

This is a bad article only meant to market the book. Almost 0 information in this, actually impressive.

Indeed. The blog is certainly not worth paying for. Grifter.

In a sense they're right then though. FOMO is the only way sales happen for grifters who have no value to sell in the first place lol.

My advice (as an older person) is to 'stop reading and start doing'. You will and can learn and get a feel for business by actual transactions with people and in particular directly with them. Where you can observe reactions (ie facial expressions) and by asking questions or offering information/answers. Especially helpful (again from personal and lucrative experience) is when you can observe reactions from some kind of interaction. (In this order: in person, by phone, by email, by text). Each has it's advantages and disadvantages (ie 'in person' less interaction (travel time etc.) but more info gleaned.

This is quite different than traditional 'manage by numbers' or 'do surveys'.

You need 3 things to make a sale:

1. Why anything? 2. Why this? 3. Why now?

Sure FOMO is one of your tools, but I suspect it's overused. Consider the classic "This price won't be around for long!" move alone.

Isn’t that FOMO?

I instantly lose trust for the sales person if they bring up any kind of time pressure.

Right? That’s a huge red flag.

Yep, I've cumulatively spent thousands on weird gadgets that have minimal use the second they appeared on eBay slightly cheap, I still haven't gotten around to upgrading from my 2015 MacBook though...

People pay for newsletters?

I'm especially curious about which ones are earning "life-changing" money for their authors. I couldn't find an easy way to list Substack newsletters by subscriber count, though. (By revenue would be even better.)

Roughly three categories: 1. Newsletters that cost a lot of money and (claim to) deliver a lot of value, examples being any number of finance/investing newsletters. 2. Massive newsletters with broad appeal. I imagine Scott Alexander, Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, et al., are doing very well for themselves. 3. Anyone in an industry with extremely lucrative advertising opportunities. And any closely-followed reviewer of very expensive tech products (high sales price * affiliate cut) is probably doing well too.

Newsletters have been a very lucrative business for a very long time. The successful ones tend to be about business strategies and case studies. People will pay for actionable business information that they can copy, apply, and profit.

Most digital newsletters are merely collections of online content or writings from one person doing things that don’t have an earning potential for readers. That’s why they don’t tend to make any money.

There is always nuance but I firmly believe FOMO is only needed to sell things people don't need and so is a very consumeristic sale tactic (that should probably disappear for our collective well-being).

To some extend. There’s many things being sold that I do not need. I don’t need any of them, but I’ll still be buying some of them. To me it’s mostly a strategy that gets them to be one of those ‘some’.

There's a lot of truth to this. Within social media e-commerce there is the idea of "merch drops" which dial up the FOMO to the max.

Ugh everything is "dropped" now. This one really gets under my skin.

New peeve dropped!

wow funny

So a trick that works, but your product still have to provide some value, try a newsletter that doesn’t have any content and try a Fomo tactic

I'm seeing house prices around me skyrocket in last couple on months - houses selling almost immediately at well above asking price (e.g. 200K above in multiple cases), and this despite already high prices and horrible affordability.

I can only attribute this to FOMO.

You may also be able to attribute it to a lack of supply, in that specific case

Or speculators and flippers, perhaps even foreign capital, buying up all available supply, because houses are financial instruments, not places to live.

You misunderstand cause and effect. They have become financial instruments because there is insufficient supply for the demand.

Unfortunately others with that level of economic ignorance tend to advocate for policies that fail to fix this and either 1) pick a few lucky winners and fuck everyone else over like rent control or 2) make things even more expensive by subsidizing house purchases or creating risk like the 2008 mortgages.

We need regulators and legislators who aren't bought and paid for.

Unfortunately, in areas where density drives value increasing supply also appears to increase demand.

Move someplace affordable isn't seen as a solution in part because it's not an intervention, it's just something people can do.

Jevons Paradox. Build 2x the thing, whether it's roads or houses, demand only gets worse.

Now I bet that expanding a road not by extra lane, but by ten of them, would exhaust all the "latent demand" and then some. Similarly, if the supply of housing were to increase tenfold, perhaps we'd run out of speculators?

Then again, leverage means they can probably absorb infinite supply - just keep loaning and buying to keep the pyramid scheme going.

Austin built enough to drop rent actually

If it was just supply (low) vs demand, then people logically would have bought earlier before prices went up.

This seems like panic buying (FOMO) - people buying because prices are rising and they don't want to risk them to get worse, or maybe they see it as a perverse sign of value (like people buying momentum stocks).

I guess it's possible

Maybe I'm just jaded from being in Seattle too long where "200k over asking despite already high prices" has been a regular thing for like... 10+ years?

I don’t really understand how the HN rating system works. I submitted this article 1 day ago, and it got completely ignored. Now I open the front page and see it there. If anyone can tell me how did this happened, I would really much appreciate it.

I hope you don’t get an answer. I’d rather people not know how to game the algorithm.

Timing and luck?

Hacker News has a "second-chance pool" [1] which I would wager was the likely path for the submission

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Sometimes I get emails when my submissions qualify for the second-chance pool. Other times it just pops up. It is confusing how the time-stamp for the submission (which I think gets reset) and the comments (which at least sometimes do not) end up looking.

It's no secret that fear can be used to coerce people into buying stuff, but that's hardly the only effective selling technique. There are others which aren't as objectionable.

Fomo is also a great way to make some one act or move the case forward.

In context to enterprise sales: most large enterprise deals need multiple stakeholders to sign off. Fomo helps your champion create the urgency needed to conclude the sale.

How much of behavioral economics is about pulling emotional levers anyway ?

Isn't the whole point of behavioral economics to explain that?

Standard economics models just assume perfect rational action by all actors.

This is just the scarcity principle and nothing new.

I've always thought of scarcity and FOMO as different things, at least from a product marketing standpoint.

Scarcity: There isn't much of this thing, so I need to compete to get it. I will prioritize it more highly. There is a scale of desire for this thing. If I believe I need it in the future rather than now, I may defer.

FOMO: 0 or 1. I am going to miss out on this. Is it important to me? If it is, I will prioritize all my resources to get it now. If I believe I need it in the future, I will act now.

Totally agree. Maybe if OP phrased it as “Urgency” instead of “Scarcity”, I would have agreed. But these are two distinct concepts that just happen to cause similar outcomes. Almost similar to a concept of an “incorrect” or “false” abstraction in SWE land.

I think urgency and scarcity are different sides to the same coin.

I did my MBA dissertation on value vs price, and nowhere in my 79 pages I mentioned FOMO.

But that was a very long time ago, I think OP has a point.

This may work B2C. For B2B you're going to lose respect by playing this game.

Nice to see Cartman get some credit here. (ref: cartmanland 2001)

Most sales are completely for no necessary utility now — often not even convenience even.

You need to create psychological need to get the buyer into an unnecessary product or service because frankly they are already over served.

This is mostly a sign of our economy being built on post-need. It’s sad because somehow we still heap suffering on ourselves as we run ragged to come up with faster ways to inject digital heroine into our kids veins.

This sales strategy has been the basis of a lot of successful companies. Groupon comes to mind

Groupon was a successful company for a time, but IIRC it has not aged well. I deleted their app a while back, when I realized I'd not used it in years.

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