Happy Thursday.
We watched Nolan’s Odyssey last week, and yes, it’s great.
But we couldn’t help but feel Cyclops was done dirty. Poor thing was doing honest work herding sheep and making cheese when strangers barged into his cave and blinded him on the way out.
Ransack the place and hurt the host? Odyssey would be a terrible AirBnB user.
Reading time: 4 minutes, 43 seconds.
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Bystander Effect
Someone collapses on a busy street. Twenty people walk past.
Everyone assumes someone else will help.
That’s the Bystander Effect: the more witnesses present, the less likely any single person acts.
Researchers Latané and Darley coined it after the 1964 Kitty Genovese case, where bystanders allegedly ignored a crime.
Their experiments showed something uncomfortable. When responsibility spreads across a crowd, it dissolves. Everyone waits for someone else to move first.
Science calls this “diffusion of responsibility.” Bigger crowd, smaller personal obligation.
You can find it in a typo in a company-wide email nobody flags. Or a group chat where your question goes unanswered for hours.
For marketers, this is gold and landmine both. Your audience is a crowd, and crowds freeze.
The fix is making one person feel personally responsible, personally the one who must act now.
Three ways to leverage the Bystander Effect
1) Speak to one person, not the crowd
Mass messaging triggers mass inaction. “Attention everyone” reads as “attention no one.”
Charity: Water built its model around this.
Instead of “help millions,” they show you one named person, one village, one specific well your donation funds.
They send GPS coordinates and photos of the exact project you funded. Suddenly you’re not one donor among thousand, but the person responsible for that well existing.
Copy this. Replace “our customers” with “you.” Make the reader feel watched, chosen, and on the hook.
2) Use scarcity to break the freeze
Crowds wait because waiting feels safe. Remove that safety.
Amazon mastered this, but most brands can follow. Just using a blunt “Only 3 left in stock — order soon” alerts on product pages can add that sense of urgency.
The message acknowledges the crowd exists, then warns the crowd is about to cost you.
Suddenly other bystanders aren’t your excuse. They’re your competition.
The reader thinks “someone else will take this from me.”
Researchers report “Only X left” messages can lift sales by triple digits, one of the biggest swings any on-page message delivers. We’ve written about it in the Scarcity Effect.
What you can do: deploy stock counters, but keep them honest. Fake urgency erodes trust fast.
3) Call people out in public
Anonymous crowds freeze. Named, watched individuals move.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge turned this into a machine. Each participant didn’t ask “someone” to donate.
They tapped three specific people, on camera, in front of everyone, with a 24-hour clock.
Once you’re publicly named, diffusion collapses. The crowd isn’t your cover anymore, it’s your audience.
That mechanic raised roughly $115 million for the ALS Association in weeks, dwarfing its usual annual haul.
Steal the structure, not the ice. Public leaderboards, “tag who’s next” prompts, and visible referral streaks all work.
Make the individual’s action, or inaction, visible to peers. When the crowd becomes the audience instead of the excuse, people act.
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AI MARKETING: Turns out AI chatbots on your website can benefit or tank your sales depending on what you’re selling. According to new data, a bot would just cause friction if you’re selling simple products and shoppers demonstrated lower shopping intent in that case. Hm.
SOCIAL MEDIA: It’s all Meta. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have each cleared 3 billion monthly actives, keeping Meta comfortably ahead of YouTube’s 2.7 billion. The family-wide total sits at 3.56 billion, a slight dip on the previous quarter but nowhere near a loss of dominance.
AI MARKETING: Also, Meta is signing the EU AI Act Code of Practice on AI content transparency. Run AI-generated creative in the EU and labeling expectations are about to firm up. Better to brace yourself than to wait.
ICYMI, last time we looked at Google Effect.
The “Someone else will do it” Crew.
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