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A story from Hooked · Endowed progress

Two free stamps: 34% finished vs 19%. Where does your product need a head start?

A car wash gave half its customers a card with 2 of 10 stamps already filled in. Same 8 washes to go. A head start did the work.

Free · 2 minutes · no signup. Gamify It is $29/mo billed annually when you want the full loop in your assistant.

Start

Endowed progress

The car wash card that came with two free stamps

34% vs 19%finished the card with a head start, vs the blank card
Nunes & Drèze (2006), as told in Hooked. Figures from the original study.

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The full story · Endowed progress

The car wash card that came with two free stamps

Hooked (Nir Eyal) · ch. 3

Same eight washes. One card felt almost started. Guess which one people finished.

A car wash handed out loyalty cards. Half the customers got a card that needed 8 stamps for a free wash, starting blank. The other half got a card that needed 10 stamps, but 2 were already stamped.

Both groups needed exactly 8 more washes. Nothing about the deal was different, only how it felt. Months later, the cards that “started” with progress were finished far more often.

Nunes & Drèze (2006), as told in Hooked. Figures from the original study.

Why it works

A head start turns a task into something you are already doing. People hate leaving things unfinished, and the closer the goal looks, the harder they push toward it.

Use it in your product

  • Start new users at step 2 of 5, with things you can honestly pre-fill (their name, imported data, a template).
  • Show a progress bar from the first screen, not after they have done the work.
  • Never fake progress the user didn’t earn; give real head starts.

Honest limits

The Stage Finder is a first read. The real one runs on your numbers.

A few self-reported answers can earn Low or Medium confidence, never High. In Claude Code, Codex, Claude or ChatGPT, Gamify It reads your real numbers, grades the evidence, picks one move and sizes the experiment to your traffic.

  • One binding stage, with a runner-up in case it is wrong
  • One next move, with its source and evidence grade
  • A Not-now list: what to skip this sprint, and why
  • An experiment sized to your traffic, and a readout that can say “inconclusive”
  • Memory: it remembers what you tried and what happened
  • What Gamify It never sees: your source code, raw events or your users’ personal data.

What you get

One card, readable in a minute.

The full Stage Card for a fictional product, Crewbook: where it is, the one bottleneck, what to skip, and the next move, sized to its traffic.

Stage Card · Crewbook

Fictional, illustrative

Shift-scheduling SaaS for independent restaurants, US ·

Where you are

Early fit (M2), confidence medium.

Restaurants with 10+ staff keep using it (31% still active at week 8); under 10 staff fall to about 4%. Unknown: the PMF survey hasn’t run yet.

Readiness

Your key action is tracked; what brings each session in is not. About 90 sign-ups a week.

Your bottleneck

Start. Only 32% of new restaurants publish a schedule that 3+ staff confirm within 7 days. Those that do are about 6× likelier to be active at week 8 (54% vs 9%; a correlation, not yet causation).

Non-obvious

Your SMS reminders go only to the manager, so staff never see the value that makes a manager come back. The trigger score is capped at 2: no trigger reaches the people whose confirmations are the reward.

Not now

Paid ads (fix the setup leak first) · annual-plan discounts (there’s no habit to protect yet) · points or badges (first steer new restaurants onto the path your retained restaurants took).

Next move

“First schedule in 10 minutes”: import staff from a CSV, generate a draft week, send confirm-by-text to staff, and ask for availability rules after.

How we’ll know

Primary: published + 3 confirmations in 7 days. Readout in about 6 weeks (a bundled change). Guardrails: 7-day trial cancels; week-2 retention.

If we’re wrong

The real bottleneck may be Value for restaurants under 10 staff.

To be more sure

(1) Run the one-question PMF survey with active restaurants. (2) Export PostHog sign-ups by week. (3) Record what brings each session in.

Sources

HK-INV19, HK-INV01, HK-ACT32, HK-TRG08 (Hooked ch. 2, 3, 5) · GT#43 and the First Major Win-State (Actionable Gamification)

  1. A stage, with its confidence

    Maturity comes from product-market-fit signals only, never traffic. The card says how sure it is and what is still unknown.

  2. One cell, not forty ideas

    Ten Constraint Rules pick the single binding cell on the Stage Map. Everything else waits.

  3. Specific to your product

    Server-side contradiction checks surface one insight about your product, not a generic tip from a book.

  4. What to skip, and why

    Good advice at the wrong stage is bad advice. The card names the tempting moves that are out of season for you.

  5. One move, every factor shown

    Moves are ranked by Size × Odds × Fit ÷ Cost, and you can argue with each factor.

  6. Sized to your traffic

    The test is sized before you build. If your traffic can’t detect the change, you get a bigger swing or the low-traffic loop instead of a micro-tweak.

Evidence, not hype

Honest numbers beat big promises.

We are new, so there are no testimonials here yet. What we can show is how we work: real cases, dated and graded, and a contract we keep in every answer.

  • M1 ×Value2018

    Superhuman: Segment before you build

    “Very disappointed” rose from 22% to 33% by segmenting alone, then to 58% in about three quarters.

    Case grade for the number: B. Evidence grade for the mechanism link: B. company-described.
  • M2 ×Start2015

    Slack: Find your activation threshold

    About 93% of teams past 2,000 messages kept using Slack, per its co-founder.

    Case grade for the number: B. Evidence grade for the mechanism link: B. correlational.
  • M4 ×Discover2026

    Peloton: Phase before mechanic

    Paid subscriptions fell 8.8% in fiscal 2026 while average monthly churn stayed at 1.7%.

    Case grade for the number: A. Evidence grade for the mechanism link: D. many causes.
  • We never promise a lift.
  • Every number carries its source, its date and its grade.
  • Readouts come with confidence intervals, and “Inconclusive” is a legitimate outcome.
  • Thresholds like a 40% PMF score are labeled heuristics, not laws.
  • Frameworks are labeled for what they are: the Hook Model is a practical tool, and Octalysis is a practitioner framework.

Pricing

One plan. The whole loop.

Every tool on every assistant, for up to 3 products. Annual saves $120 a year.

$29a month, billed annually ($348)

Or $39 billed monthly. Cancel in one click. Your first payment is refundable within 14 days.

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Questions

Fair questions.

Find the stage you’re stuck in. Then make one move.

Free · 2 minutes · no signup. Gamify It is $29/mo billed annually when you want the full loop in your assistant.

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