Weekly writing about how technology and people intersect. By day, I’m building Daybreak to partner with early-stage founders. By night, I’m writing Digital Native about market trends and startup opportunities.

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How the Best Products Remove Guilt

Gruns is one of the fastest-growing brands in history.

The gummy vitamins brand launched in 2023 and hit $100M revenue run-rate earlier this year. As of August, the company was tracking at $300M run-rate.

In the midst of AI mania, Gruns—alongside other recent success stories like Poppi (acquired by Pepsi for $1.95B) and Rhode (acquire by e.l.f. Beauty for $1B)—is a reminder that big companies can come from stale or saturated categories, when a founder brings a fresh insight.

Gruns’s founder, Chad Janis, noticed a couple things. First, Chad noticed that companies like AG1 were taking off. Second, he noticed that companies like AG1 had the form factor all wrong: people hated mixing powders into waters, which was (1) messy and (2) inconvenient. So Chad changed the form factor to gummies.

When you think about it, the Gruns product isn’t that different than those Flintstones vitamins we all ate as kids in the 90s (core childhood memory). Gruns breathed new life into a tired but fast-growing category.

This piece isn’t about consumer brands. It’s about how to build products with a pulse on human psychology.

To frame the Gruns insight even more sharply:

My friend Brian Sugar, an early investor in Gruns, put it this way in a smart blog post: Gruns took a form factor people loved but felt guilty about consuming (gummy bears) and flipped it on its head. As Brian puts it, “Suddenly eating gummies wasn’t a vice, it was taking your vitamins.” It became responsible to eat gummy bears.

This is a pretty interesting formula:

1. Take something that people know they should do, but don’t like doing.

2. And turn it into something they like doing.

This formula has been stuck in my brain the last week. I keep turning it over in my head, thinking about what other businesses can be born from the same mind trick. Naturally, I keep thinking about how it can be applied to AI.

Enterprise AI vs. Consumer AI

You can tailor this psychology for enterprise or for consumer, with a few tweaks.

Enterprise = flip pain → pleasure

To start with enterprise, we all have a ton of important things we have to do, but don’t like doing: writing reports, filing expenses, scheduling meetings, managing a CRM, dealing with PDF forms and signatures. Work is full of messy, mind-numbing, frustrating stuff. That stuff fills a good portion of our days.

How can AI products turn this stuff into something enjoyable?

One approach: you go from the worker to the manager. Maybe making a slide deck isn’t fun for you; for most of us, it isn’t. But if an agent presents you with three slide options, and you get to critique the design and the copy? That becomes fun. All of a sudden, you’re not doing the busy work; you’re delegating, and you’re an arbiter of taste.

I’ve been thinking about this framework when using AI products. To continue with the slide deck example: Gamma automates the part of slide creation I hate (writing copy, aligning text boxes) while letting me focus on parts I enjoy (choosing the slide design and the art style).

For enterprise AI, I think of effective AI products as tapping this formula:

1. Take something you have to do but dislike (mundane, annoying tasks)

2. Make them more enjoyable (manage a team of agents, become the boss)

All of a sudden, ICs become managers. In a few years, I think there will be 100 AI coworkers for every human coworker. (This future is inevitable; our kids will find it laughable that we only collaborated with other humans, not armies of agents.) The key question in product design is choosing which moments to automate and which moments to keep human.

Good products will find ways to take stuff we don’t like and make it enjoyable. Taking your vitamins becomes eating gummy bears.

Consumer = flip guilt → permission

To turn to consumer, I think of consumer as the inverse formula:

1. Take something we really enjoy doing, but feel guilty about.

2. And make us not feel so guilty about it!

Take content consumption. Most of us feel guilty watching hours of TikTok or Netflix. It feels passive and lazy. What if AI can make content more active, more participatory? Generative storytelling means you can be co-creator, prompting a film on your own whims; your decisions dictate character actions and plot lines. All of a sudden, content consumption doesn’t feel as lazy, and you don’t feel as guilty.

Or take online shopping. Most people feel guilty about impulse purchases, dropping $100 on a skincare serum or fancy candle or new pair of shoes. But agents can turn online shopping into something more responsible, analyzing price drops, savings, reviews, resale value, and so on. What was a vice becomes a virtue; shopping becomes smart and savvy, not impulsive.

In both these examples, products play on your psychology to give you permission for indulgences and to remove the guilt.

Final Thoughts

The best products weaponize guilt and pleasure. They tap into basic human psychology, making us feel good about ourselves while doing stuff we like doing.

• If you’re building in enterprise, find the stuff people hate doing and make it less miserable.

• If you’re building in consumer, find the stuff people love doing and remove the shame.

That’s the formula. I expect we’ll see this emotional arbitrage in more AI products.

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Sources & Additional Reading

• H/t to Brian Sugar’s piece for inspiring this one—you can read it here

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