What I'm Reading, Saving, and Rethinking

Happy Friday! Every week, I save dozens of posts, articles, and newsletters that challenge my thinking. Here's what stood out this week and why I think it's worth your time too.

🔥 This Week's Saves

🔗 Why $1 Fries Feel Amazing…but $7 Deodorant Feels Like a Scam

Summary: A $1 order of fries? Feels like a steal. A $7 stick of deodorant? Feels like a rip-off. Why? Because value perception isn't about price, it's about emotional context and expectations. Fries are hot, salty, indulgent, and instantly satisfying. Deodorant? It's invisible, utilitarian, and offers no immediate gratification. One delivers joy; the other just prevents embarrassment.

Why It Matters: If you're building a product and thinking, “We just need to price it right,” you're missing the point. Price is only one part of the equation. Emotional payoff is everything. People happily pay $5 for a latte because it feels like a treat. But they'll balk at $5 for a productivity app if it doesn't immediately make them feel smarter, faster, or more in control. Price must match the context.

My Take: We often obsess over features and pricing models, but neglect the emotional resonance of their product (i.e. shifting to how the price feels, not what it is).

Bottom Line: People don't buy products; they buy feelings. Or, more to the point, they buy the way they think the product will make them feel in the immediate future. People don’t buy fries, they buy a party in their mouth. They buy a salty and savory dopamine hit.

🔗 How McDonald's Found Out Its Wildly Popular Monopoly Game Was a Fraud

Summary: In the late '80s and early ‘90s, McDonald’s partnered with Monopoly and hooked everyone into buying more Bic Macs (me included). The pitch? Every meal = a chance to win. It became the playbook for gamified marketing:

• Instant wins for dopamine hits

• Rare pieces to stoke obsession

• Cultural rituals that locked people in year after year

But here’s the twist: it was rigged. “Uncle Jerry,” the guy overseeing game security, siphoned off the rare pieces and sold them through a black-market prize network. The FBI eventually took him down. Total fraud: $24 million.

And yet? It’s still a masterclass in marketing.

Why It Matters: This was a full-blown growth engine disguised as a game. It worked because it didn’t feel like marketing. It felt like my chance to win big (besides the random “free hash brown” board piece I’d always get).

You’re not in the business of selling features or offers. You’re in the business of engineering obsession. McDonald’s nailed it:

• Habit formation (peel-and-reveal UX)

• Recurring engagement loops (seasonal campaigns with high replay value)

• Perceived progress (people felt close to winning)

• Network effects (trading pieces, talking about the game, digging in trash bins...)

My Take: Monopoly worked because it was:

• Familiar (zero onboarding friction)

• Emotional (hope, fun, community)

• Scarce (1 elusive piece kept people coming back)

• Seasonal (a “McMoment” people looked forward to)

It built ritual. And ritual was the north star.

Bottom Line: If you want to build demand that scales, stop thinking like a performance marketer and start thinking like a game designer.

👉 Engineer emotional payoffs
👉 Introduce meaningful scarcity
👉 Build repeatable cultural events

And don’t become another “Uncle Jerry.”

🔗 How to Measure Topical Authority [in 2025]

Summary: Topical authority is the new SEO moat, especially in a world where AI Overviews and LLMs rewrite how content gets surfaced. Kevin Indig offers a method to quantify your topical authority using a three-pronged framework:

1. Search Performance: Track how many keywords you rank for in a topic cluster and how deep those rankings go (top 3 vs. top 10).

2. Entity Coverage: Use tools like InLinks or Kalicube to measure how comprehensively you cover entities (people, topics, terms) tied to your niche.

3. Semantic Coverage: Count the number of semantically related topics you’ve published about—building a dense, interconnected content graph.

Together, these metrics help you measure whether Google and AI models see you as a subject-matter expert or not.

Why It Matters: Backlinks used to be your golden ticket. Now? Google’s tuning its trust radar toward depth, not just popularity.

Topical authority:

• Shapes AI answer boxes

• Influences which brands surface in generative search

• Future-proofs your SEO flywheel in an LLM-dominated world

If you're running a startup, being the best in your category isn't enough. You have to appear to be the most authoritative in Google’s eyes. That takes structure.

My Take: Too many startups spray content hoping something sticks.
This gives you a way to map, measure, and dominate your niche with surgical precision.

Want to rank? Cover the topic like you’re writing a damn PhD.
Want to win? Make your content the obvious source to cite, summarize, and steal from.

Bottom Line: In 2025, topical authority is the compounding asset of content marketing. So build it, track it, defend it. And if you don’t? Someone else will show up with 10 blog posts, 50 internal links, and an entity map that tells Google they deserve the top spot.

This newsletter is for you. What marketing challenges are you facing in your marketing journey? Reply directly to this email with your questions or topics you'd like to see covered in future issues.

Until next week,

Adam

P.S. Found this helpful? Forward it to another founder who might benefit—we're all in this together.