How to make people pay more with the art of ‘Visible Labor’ 👷

My secret trick for justifying higher prices & loading times 🌶️

Have you ever noticed that many restaurants have open kitchens?

It’s not just about transparency… It’s the ‘Labor Illusion’ at play: people value things more when they see the effort behind them.

People perceive products that involve visible effort as more valuable.

It works for both human & machine labor. Even when an algorithm does the work, seeing its ‘struggle’ increases our appreciation for the outcome!

The Marketing Idea 💡

Showing what your product is doing “behind the scenes” → will satisfy people. Humans LOVE seeing how hard people or machines work for them. They will overvalue your product thanks to it.

How can you do it in your startup?

Here’s my playbook 👇

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Tactic #1: Offer a Behind-the-Scenes Access 🎪

You can do it in 3 ways:

1. Explain how the product works / how complex your technology is:

100 years ago, Schlitz beer introduced a slogan that said, “Every bottle is sterilized” and is good for your health.

Even though all breweries were already sterilizing their bottles, most customers didn't know this.

By highlighting standard practice, Schlitz beer quickly became the most popular beer in the country, moving up from 8th best-selling to #1.

Another example is Nespresso: they are famous for sharing the stories of those who harvested the coffee beans that ended up in the capsules. I assume many coffee makers could say the same thing 🤓

The lesson… 👉 Making people aware of a process can make them value the product more, even if that process is widely used in the industry.

2. Show how hard you work yourself:

Another great way to achieve labor illusion is through ‘Founder Marketing’ (building in public and sharing some internal insights on social media). For example, I love this ‘building in public’ story - Louis’ efforts here actually made me buy his program.

3. Operational transparency:

Lastly, update your users on what is happening after they buy your product. Domino’s Pizza’s order tracker is the best example of operational transparency:

In my experience, it’s best to provide a high resolution of transparency and show exactly what the algorithm is doing every second.

If you have a progress bar, split it up and explain what your software is doing in every second.

Which would you prefer, A or B?

While B helps with operational transparency, it’s worth mentioning that A is also great for ‘Endowed Progress’ - it’s easier to know when we will reach 100%

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Tactic #2: Add Fake Friction 🤹🏻

Sometimes, operational transparency is not enough — because you are too efficient.

If your service is lightning-fast, consider adding a bit of theatrical delay (fake friction).

A few years ago, Harvard Business Review researched how people feel when booking flights online. ✈️

They compared two websites: one with a basic progress bar and another that showed each airline being searched in detail.

Even though the second site was slower, sometimes by 30-60 seconds, most people liked it better because it seemed more transparent.

That’s exactly how Skyscanner works today: The search results are being added live, one by one, making us appreciate the work of the algorithm behind the scenes.

Another example of fake friction:

When I created the Viral Post Generator, I added a loading screen that took exactly 10 seconds to complete (even though the actual loading time was 0.5 seconds).

Why? Because I ran some A/B tests and saw that people share the result more the longer they wait - so I created this fake loading animation.

One more example (my favorite!):

When I led growth marketing at the startup Mine, we had a nice feature showing our customers ultra-specific info about their incoming privacy requests. We called it ‘evidence’.

However, data showed that people skip the evidence and never use it. Some even asked us via the support team if such evidence existed.

So we added some artificial friction and hid the evidence behind a button. 🙈 Users had to click “Search for evidence” to see it. We even implemented a fake progress bar that took 3-4 seconds to complete.

It was technically completely unnecessary, but it worked! People clicked it like crazy and used the evidence drastically more because of that little change.

We added a fake button for searching for evidence (even though no search was needed)

Lastly, while there’s no research to support this (yet), I bet that people overvalue the results of GPT-4, compared to GPT-3.5, just because GPT-4 writes slower.

Note: Fake friction can harm your product’s UX and lead to higher churn. Test with caution before applying.

The Bottom Line 🧠

Before delivering your “Aha” moment, think:

Can you show your labor / add a touch of friction?

When people see the effort behind your product - they're more likely to assign it a greater value.

See you next week ✌️

Tom

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P.S. Here's a little trick I use daily because of the Labor Illusion:

I always set my email replies to be sent 'later.' This way, it looks like I’ve put extra thought into them.

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