Atticus Li — Better Decisions

Most low-traffic SaaS teams do not have a testing problem.

Most bad product tests don't fail because the idea was weak.

Your test can look clean and still be wrong.

When I review a B2B SaaS test plan, I start with one question: can people inside the same account affect each other?

A test can look like a winner because three customers showed up with a corporate card.

If your team can't find a winning test in 30 seconds, the name is broken.

Most SaaS checkouts do not fail because the buyer suddenly stops wanting the product.

A test can lift conversion and still hurt revenue.

You can run a clean test and still make the wrong call.

Most bad A/B test calls are not statistics problems.

A test doesn't create value when the chart turns green.

The most common mistake I see with activation metrics is picking one that feels important instead of one that's predictive.

Most A/B test hypotheses I review are not hypotheses.

The most dangerous SaaS test win is the one that looks clean, gets shipped fast, and fades a month later.

There is a moment in every purchase decision where a customer shifts from browsing to buying.

Most pricing strategy conversations center on what number to put on the page.

Most behavioral-econ posts treat persuasion techniques like spells.

TL;DR Behavioral economics explains mechanisms that may shape a decision.

Walk into most retail optimization programs and you'll find the same thing: a backlog of tests that all feel urgent, a dashboard celebrating win rates that seem suspiciously high, and a team that can't quite explain why conversion hasn't moved in two quar…

Walk the floor of almost any retail operation running A/B tests, and you'll notice the same pattern: the tests are neat, the hypotheses are tidy, and the results are almost entirely wrong about why something worked.

Walk into any major retail site and look at how many decisions a shopper makes before completing a purchase.

In April 2020, Quibi launched into one of the most hyped streaming-service rollouts in modern entertainment history.

For decades, Patrick Winston — the longtime director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory — gave a single lecture every January at MIT, attended by hundreds of students, faculty, and outside professionals who would fly in just to hear it.

On October 14, 2012, an Austrian skydiver named Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a small pressurized capsule suspended from a helium balloon at the edge of space.

In 2008, the behavioral economist Dan Ariely set up a candy stand in the lobby of an MIT student center.

Here is a thought experiment that should make any product team uncomfortable.

In November 2011, the JCPenney board of directors made what looked, at the time, like one of the smartest hires in modern American retail.

In 1968, a Polish-American social psychologist named Robert Zajonc published a 27-page monograph in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled "Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure."

In 1990, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler ran an experiment at Cornell University that has since become one of the most-cited findings in behavioral economics.

Picture the last time an email landed in your inbox with URGENT in the subject line.

On Day 1 of SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, on the Other stage, four practitioners — an urban designer, a film producer, a digital-twin engineer, and a Hollywood screenwriter — sat down to make a strange but interesting claim.

In 2009, a usability researcher named Jared Spool wrote up one of the most consequential case studies in the history of UX design.

The average American grocery store carries about 30,000 SKUs.

In 2001, two researchers at MIT — Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester — published a paper that should have been required reading for anyone designing a payment flow.

In the 1940s, the owners of a New York office building had a complaint problem.

In 1885, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus published one of the strangest research programs in the history of psychology.

When Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson started designing the first Apple Store in 2000, they did something that, in retrospect, looks obvious but at the time was almost unheard of in technology retail.

April 23, 1985.

In 1977, three Stanford psychologists — Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House — published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology called "The 'False Consensus Effect': An Egocentric Bias in Social Perception and Attribution Processes."

The most useful thing the investor Charlie Munger ever said wasn't about investing.

In 2002, the Mini Cooper relaunched in the United States after a 24-year absence from the American market.

On Day 1 of SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, on the Main Stage, three of the most thoughtful voices in Japanese civic technology sat down to discuss how Japan might build the civic infrastructure to keep its democracy healthy through the next decade of generative A…

When the Federal Trade Commission filed against Amazon in 2023, one detail stuck with me.

On Day 1 of SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, on the Main Stage, two of the most influential elected officials in Japan stood next to each other and made the case that startups are now national strategy.

On Day 2 of SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, on the Main Stage, five Japanese tech leaders staged an Oxford-style debate on a single proposition: Truly effective A.I. replaces the need for human workers.

In April 2009, two Domino's Pizza employees in Conover, North Carolina, named Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer, filmed themselves doing genuinely unspeakable things to a sandwich and uploaded the videos to YouTube.

Most marketing copy is bad in ways that are actually research-documented.

In 1975, an economist at the Bank of England named Charles Goodhart was working on monetary policy.

Here's a fact that's hard to believe today: in 1980, Kmart was bigger than Walmart.

In 1957, a Harvard psychologist named B.F.