Today's Bite 🧠

Bite 044 · Mon 28 Sep 2026
44Total bites
1This week 🎉
✅ Psychology

Give people a head start and more of them finish

People try harder to finish a goal once they believe they’ve already started it, even when the head start is made up. In Nunes and Drèze’s 2006 car-wash study, a 10-stamp loyalty card that came with two stamps already filled got nearly twice as many completions as a blank 8-stamp card, though both needed exactly eight washes. The work was identical; framing it as progress already made is what got people to finish.

💡 Why it matters

Most onboarding flows, checklists and loyalty schemes start people at zero, and an empty progress bar is the easiest thing in the world to abandon.

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