Happy Thursday.
Quick poll: how many browser tabs are open on your screen right now? If the answer is “don’t ask,” you’re officially one of us. Let’s dive in.
Reading time: 4 minutes, 45 seconds
HubSpot AEO is here!
Picture this. A buyer opens ChatGPT and asks for a recommendation in your category. Your competitor’s name comes up. Yours doesn’t. And that buyer never makes it to your website.
That’s happening right now in markets everywhere. And most teams don’t know it’s happening because it never shows up in their analytics.
HubSpot AEO shows you exactly where your brand stands in AI search, where competitors are getting recommended instead of you, and tells you specifically what to fix. No expertise needed.
Pain of Paying
Ever notice how a $60 dinner feels fine on a credit card but physically stings in cash? You pay the same, but it’s a different ouch.
That ouch has a name. The Pain of Paying was coined in 1996 by Ofer Zellermayer at Carnegie Mellon, then formalized by Prelec and Loewenstein in 1998.
Researchers say handing over money feels like a loss. It’s our brain’s built-in spending brake, keeping budgets in check.
And it’s not metaphorical. A 2007 fMRI study showed high prices activate the insula, a brain region tied to physical pain.
Here’s the useful part: the pain isn’t fixed.
Even a ticking taxi meter reduces the pleasure of the ride itself. That’s why all-inclusive resorts feel so liberating. Pay once, consume guilt-free.
We can’t delete prices. But we can move, split, and mute the moment of payment. Three ways to do it below.
Three ways to leverage the Pain of Paying
1) Make the payment invisible
Uber built its product around killing the payment moment. The trip ends, the stored card is charged immediately, and the receipt lands by email.
No wallet. No terminal. No pain spike at the exact second you’d judge the price.
Uber explicitly describes the experience as designed to be entirely cashless. The pricing didn’t change, but the feeling did.
How to apply this: Store payment details, enable one-tap reorders, charge after value is delivered. Every checkout field you remove is a pain you remove.
2) Split the sting
Klarna’s Pay in 4 chops one scary number into four small ones. Shoppers pay 25% at checkout, and the rest auto-collects every two weeks.
The math is identical. The feeling isn’t. Four $25 losses register as smaller than one $100 hit.
The numbers agree: Shopify data shows order values rise an average of 68% when Buy now, pay later (BNPL) installments are available.
If you haven’t yet, offer BNPL on carts above your AOV. Show the per-installment price on product pages, not just at checkout.
3) Flat-rate the ticking meter
Usage-based pricing is a taxi meter in SaaS clothing. Every metered API call nudges the bill, so customers ration usage and resent you.
TravelTime, a location API, went the other way. It charges flat rates with unlimited usage instead of per-hit fees.
Offer flat tiers or prepaid credits. Predictable bills remove the anxiety that throttles usage. And renewals.
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 Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
- The Indonesian conglomerate that put 280 million people on wheels.
- The Californian salvage yard that quietly became a $32B marketplace.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
AI SEARCH: An analysis of Google’s May core update found that authority alone no longer makes the winners. Big names like nytimes.com dropped, while original sources climbed. The thing that made a difference was source-type fit, apparently. So make of that what you will.
CHATGPT: The chatbot’s ads are going global, with targeting reaching the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico. OpenAI is testing slots that bundle several sponsored results through a second-price auction. New Ads Manager tools round things out, so get familiar now.
TIKTOK: Working with Circana across 97 studies in six European markets, the platform found FMCG campaigns lift in-store sales 2.7% against a 2.3% social baseline. And going live during quiet, non-seasonal stretches drove 46% higher lift. Stay always-on rather than chasing peaks.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Compromise Effect.
The “It hurts” Crew.
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