How to use Loss aversion to grow your SaaS

You can considerably improve your sales if you learn to use loss aversion efficiently. Here’s how to do it.

Ana Bibikova
9 min readMay 12, 2022

In April 2014 Pieter Levels, now well-known founder of Nomad List and Rebase.co launched Go Fucking Do it — a tool where you pledge money to achieve your goals. The idea was crazy simple: just set your goal publicly, name your pledge (can be anything, no limits) and the timeframe (for ex. stop drinking coffee completely in a month). Then stick to achieving your goal. If you fail, the money goes to Pieter. According to Pieter Levels, in 1 month the website received $30K pledges. He’s got an offer to buy the service for $45K (remind you, it was almost 10 years ago when startup prices were much less than today!) and was reached out by a fund managing $200M of venture money.

Why did everyone suddenly get so excited?

Because somewhere deep down most of us know for certain: loss aversion is one of the most (if not the most) powerful techniques to make someone do something.

a landing page with hands typing

How does Loss Aversion work in real life?

I found out about the Loss aversion principle for the first time when I was a first-time Mom. My 2 yo started to socialize actively on the playgrounds and I…

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