The Human Edit: The Dopamine Sale

I am embarrassingly quick to buy a quick fix on Instagram. I'll be scrolling through my feed, and someone announces they have a new book coming out on refocusing your work life. Instantly, my brain goes: yes, that is exactly what I need right now. I hit pre-order immediately.

Or I'll see an ad for an app that promises to turn a chaotic folder of photos into a slick little video in seconds, and I subscribe on the spot. In that exact moment, I desperately need whatever they're selling.

Fast forward a month.

The book is sitting in a pile of other unread books next to my bed. The app is buried on the fourth page of my phone screen, completely untouched.

I didn't read past the bio. I didn't learn how to use the app. I was so hooked by the dopamine hit of the promise that I bought in - but the reality is, I wasn't invested enough to actually carve out the time to use them.

It was just a forgotten transaction.

We spend so much time obsessing over getting that quick yes in marketing. We want the download, the trial, the quick sale at any cost. We celebrate the transaction. We ring the bell.

And it’s because the sale is where the metric gets logged. It's where the campaign gets credited, where the LinkedIn post goes up, where the commission gets paid. What happens after the yes is someone else's problem - retention, success, another team, next quarter.

We built the entire marketing machine around the moment of purchase and called that success.

But if someone buys the software and never logs in, or downloads the guide and leaves it in their inbox forever, what have we actually built? A list of people who panic-bought in the moment, ghosts in a CRM that looks healthy and isn't.

We all know it's infinitely easier to sell to an existing customer than to find a new one. But if your existing customers are a list of dopamine purchases that went nowhere, you don't have existing customers. You have a churn problem with good branding on top.

The real measure isn't the sale. It's whether someone came back.

Whether they opened the book. Logged into the platform. Told someone else about it unprompted. That's the thing we should be ringing the bell for.

Until we start measuring that, we're just chasing the hit.