Carly and Joe had me on The Life-First Solopreneur to dig into something that sounds counterintuitive until it clicks: the psychology behind why people swipe, match, and keep coming back to dating apps is the exact same playbook that drives sustainable business growth.
Listen to the full episode here: Episode page · Apple Podcasts · YouTube · Spotify ·
The episode goes deep on a lot of ground in 35 minutes. Some of what we unpacked:
Understanding your user beats everything else
The biggest mistake solopreneurs make is building before they understand who they’re building for. Not in a demographic sense, but psychologically. What does your user feel in the moment they encounter your product? What are they afraid of? What would make them feel understood? That question changes everything downstream.
Rejection as a competitive advantage
Getting rejected from Microsoft early in my career felt like a setback. Looking back, it was the thing that forced me to bet on myself. There’s a muscle you build through repeated rejection — and the solopreneurs who develop it have a durability that others don’t. Exposure to rejection, done deliberately, is one of the most underrated growth strategies out there.
The unfinished task principle
Ever notice how a progress bar makes you want to complete it? Or how a cliffhanger makes you stay up until 2am? That’s not an accident. Our brains are wired to fixate on incomplete tasks. If you’re not building this into your onboarding, your emails, or your product experience, you’re leaving retention on the table.
Cialdini’s persuasion tactics, applied
Most people have heard of Robert Cialdini’s principles — scarcity, social proof, authority, reciprocity. Fewer people have figured out how to apply them without feeling manipulative. The difference comes down to grounding them in something real. Fake scarcity collapses. Real scarcity compounds.
Building social proof before you have customers
You don’t need a hundred testimonials to start. One or two real customers who got genuine results, documented well, can do more work than a wall of five-star reviews. The key is specificity. Generic praise is invisible. Specific transformation is what people remember.
The TRUTH framework for authentic branding
In a world flooded with AI-generated content, sounding like a real human is becoming a genuine competitive advantage. The TRUTH framework — Transparency, Relatability, Uniqueness, Trustworthiness, Honesty — is how I think about building a brand that actually feels like a person, not a press release.
Curiosity as an overlooked growth lever
Most founders optimize for clicks and conversions. The ones who build something lasting optimize for curiosity. What makes someone wonder what comes next? What creates a loop they want to close? That’s where the magic moments live.
All of this and more is in Outrageous Startup Growth.