In the early 1990s, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier ran a bizarre experiment during colonoscopies—not to study medicine, but memory. They found that patients didn’t judge the procedure by its duration or total pain. They judged it by one spike and how it ended.
A single bad moment outweighed an hour of mild discomfort. A gentler ending rewired the entire memory into something “not that bad.”
It became the Peak-End Rule—the idea that humans don’t store experiences accurately. We store the peak and the finish.
Think from your own experience:
One rude waiter ruins a great restaurant. One confusing screen kills an otherwise solid app. One "ugh, nothing here fits my diet" resets a shopper’s loyalty in seconds.
The world runs on peaks and endings. Businesses rise or fall on how often they trigger them.
FlavCity’s $10M Playbook
Once you understand the Peak-End Rule, grocery shelves start to look very different. Brands obsess over flavor, packaging, and influencers—the middle moments. But shoppers remember the friction spike: the label that fails their rulebook, the ingredient they’re avoiding, the product that almost fits but doesn’t.
That’s why FlavCity didn’t launch with a smoothie. They launched with a scanner app.
Millions used Bobby Parrish’s "Bobby Approved" to navigate seed oils, gums, sugars, and additives—the hidden constraints that create those peak pain moments in the aisle. Every scan was a data point. Every failed product was a map of unmet demand. Every grocery trip was a live focus group.
When you own the rulebook people shop with, you don’t guess your way into retail—you arrive with pre-verified velocity. A guaranteed cohort. SKUs the data has already chosen.
Influencers have graduated from CPG.
This is first-party demand manufacturing, and it’s about to reshape every aisle in Target.
From the Vault
CivicVend OS: The $50B Opioid Settlement Compliance Layer
Cities are installing Narcan, period-product, and book-vending machines at breakneck speed—all funded by a historic $50B settlement. What nobody realized: there’s zero unified system showing whether any of it works. CivicVend OS becomes the accountability layer.
Bob & Brad’s $2.5K Amazon Play: Creator Hardware Hits Mainstream
Two physical therapists just sold a $2,499 chair on Amazon with no retail footprint, no VC, and no CAC—just trust and 5M subscribers. The real story isn’t the chair; it’s that creators can now move high-ticket hardware with zero acquisition cost and BNPL fuel. Whole appliance categories are now vulnerable to niche creators who deeply understand one problem.
Vimeo’s Enterprise Pivot Opens a $26B Attribution Market
Vimeo quietly turned video libraries into searchable knowledge bases. Now enterprises can query demos, webinars, and testimonials like databases—but they still have no way to prove which videos move revenue. The gap is a cross-platform experiment engine that unifies Vimeo, Wistia, Brightcove and ties video consumption directly to pipeline.
The Side Door
→ GovCart — SaaS Compliance Checkout for the $40B SmartPay Program
→ OpenRing SDK — OpenXR Middleware for the $2.5B Smart Ring Market
In startup business, the winners are the ones who instrument reality (yup, Steve Jobs comes to mind). The future belongs to operators who bend raw behavior into production certainty. Study how users think and behave, not what they tell you. Peaks and endings decide everything.
