6 ways to improve your product without changing your product

🧠 First, A Quick Psych Lesson

Humans haven’t evolved to deal with perfect information. We perceive the world in a way that aggregates a lot of information to create a watered-down impression on things.

We don’t have the mental capacity or the willingness to think about every microprocessor, piece of code, or raw material that goes into making a product.

Instead, we often use shortcuts to classify things according to a few key triggers that we repeatedly come across and then respond without thinking when one or another of these triggers are present.

A good example for this is a product like wine. 🍷

If you give someone a glass of wine, it will tend to taste better when:

• You pour it from a heavier bottle.

• You tell them that it’s expensive.

• You tell them that there’s a history to it.

Conversely, (this may be a silly example but) that same glass of wine will be perceived to taste bad when you tell that person that you spit in it.

Reality hasn’t changed. It’s the same, unaltered glass of wine. But the perception of the wine has changed due to the story being told.

We use our mental shortcuts to assess situations:

Heavier bottle = good

Expensive = good

History = good

Spit in drink = bad

Similarly, we as consumers use these mental shortcuts to assess products. If we’re shown a product that has a landing page with poorly matched colors, poor quality images, and unclear copywriting, it doesn’t matter if that product will grant us eternal youth, we’ll perceive it to be a bad product.

🎯 The 6 Tips

So here are 6 tactical ways you can add intangible value to your product to help your customers see it in a more favorable light. I recommend using many of these tactics at the same time:

🎨 Have a prominent, unified design

Products with great design are perceived more positively and are more recognizable. When your design is well done and pleasing to the eye, you can use it as a marketing channel to signal the value of your product.

🔍 Use the contrast principle

Before showing your own product to the consumer, show off a worse product or the product of your competitor. Highlight features in that product that aren’t as good as yours. When you do this beforehand, your product will look much better than had you shown it first.

🔒 Limit the supply of or access to your product

When you keep the supply of your product lower than the amount of people that want it, your product is perceived as more valuable. Simple supply and demand. Kanye West does this with his sneaker releases and Superhuman does this with their email software.

❤️ Show that there are already people that like your product

Your product will seem more desirable to consumers if you can show that many others are using your products. Customers will be more likely to buy when shown evidence that others are buying too.

💰Increase your prices

Back to the mental shortcuts: Expensive = good. This mental shortcut works for us most of the time. The more expensive coat lasts longer and the more expensive food tastes better and is more nutritious. So why shouldn’t that apply to products?

📕 Have a compelling backstory

Which dining room table sounds more valuable? The one made from the wood in the forest nearby or the one made from the trees imported from Japan and craved using a traditional Japanese woodcutting techniques?

Applying concepts of consumer psychology and behavior economics to indie hacking can really improve the finished product. I'll start writing more about these topics as I apply them to my own products that I build.

If you liked this I share product tips weekly here
👉 TheProductPerson.com.

Thanks for reading