what makes someone want to belong?
an early piece on incentives, belief, and what happens after the reward.
Why it matters
For any person to believe in something, they need a sense of alignment with the brand, product, or problem. This can be something as simple as a colour or a name, or something as complex as global impact or quarterly goals.
That alignment comes in degrees. Some people try a product once. Others keep coming back, tell a friend, or help shape what it becomes.
The interesting part
Finding believers requires a deep understanding of the problem, the market, the solution, and consumer psychology. There is a balance: enough incentive for someone to give something a fair shot, without changing their perception of the brand entirely.
Getting people onboard and leaving them with a sense of “this is a no-brainer” requires aligning the right kind of incentive and distributing it to the right people.
The tug of war between attracting people, incentivising them, and turning them into believers is fascinating.
Learning by doing
At Clique, as a growth product manager, I ran a trading-incentive program across 34 apps on Optimism and built Superchain user acquisition funnels.
That work put the question into practice: how do you give someone a reason to try something, and then a reason to stay? An incentive can get someone through the door. It doesn't, by itself, tell you whether they want to be there.
The question underneath the work stays the same: what makes someone want to belong? And what still works after the incentives stop?