Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The right friction raises conversion
Why added steps can help
Cutting every step to reach value fastest usually doesn't work once flows have been thoroughly tested. Masterclass runs buyers through a quiz about their interests before they can buy, and that quiz was a significant revenue driver, because it made the product feel made for them and let the site recommend the right classes. Calm's purchase flow has a quiz as well.
Mercury and Anthropic
At Mercury, splitting five or six form inputs across two screens lowered the cognitive load and performed better, and added steps performed well there too. Anthropic's onboarding asks people who they are and what they're interested in, then recommends products and features. The flow is long, and the data backs it.
After activation
The answers keep paying off after activation. They feed lifecycle messaging, and when someone drops off, they power look-alike targeting at the ad layer.
Why do quizzes make products feel personal?
A quiz makes the buyer a participant, and people tend to value what they have put effort into. Marketing researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely called this the IKEA effect in a 2012 paper, after finding that people valued products they had assembled themselves more than identical finished ones. Answering questions also commits a person to a direction. Robert Cialdini described this in his 1984 book Influence: people who take a small action tend to act consistently with it afterward.
How does splitting a form ease the load?
People can hold only a handful of items in working memory at once. Psychologist George Miller's 1956 paper put the figure at about seven, and later researchers lowered it to around four. Showing fewer fields per screen keeps each screen within that limit, even though the total number of fields stays the same. Multi-step forms with a progress indicator are a standard pattern in checkout design.
How does look-alike targeting work?
An advertiser gives an ad platform a list of its best customers, and the platform finds other users whose behavior and profile resemble that group. The platform's models score its whole user base against the seed list and return the closest matches. Meta introduced its Lookalike Audiences tool in 2013. Google offers a similar feature for its ad products.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
