Beyond Revenue: Why B2C Founders Must Think About User Psychology

At the end of a recent Levels Podcast episode, Barak Glanz, CMO of Coddy, shared a thought that captures something essential about building consumer products.

It wasn't about growth hacks, conversion rates, or revenue metrics. It was about responsibility.

"In B2C, you don't just build the product, right? You don't just save someone else's money. It doesn't work like that. You become a part of someone else's life. And for that matter, a lot of someone else's lives. So this is something that we all always need to keep in our mind, that it's an opportunity and also a responsibility that we become a good part of someone else's life. That's how we become the extraordinary."

For founders transitioning from B2B to B2C, or for those just starting their B2C journey, this mindset shift is fundamental. You're not selling software to companies anymore. You're entering people's daily routines, their habits, their emotional lives.

The B2B vs. B2C Mindset Difference

Jason, one of the podcast hosts, articulated the distinction clearly:

"B2B software, like what we're working on at Trophy now, it's the kind of thing that it plugs into an organization and it becomes like a kind of invisible thing that powers the organization, but it doesn't play a day-to-day role in people's lives in the same way that B2C does."

B2B software solves organizational problems. When it works well, it fades into the background, becoming infrastructure. Success means efficiency, cost savings, and process improvements.

B2C products operate in a fundamentally different space. They occupy mental bandwidth. They trigger emotions. They integrate into daily rhythms and personal identities. Users don't just use them—they develop relationships with them.

This changes everything about how you build, market, and think about your product.

Designing for Psychology, Not Just Functionality

When building B2C products, design choices aren't just about usability—they're about emotional impact.

Take Coddy's energy system. The decision to limit usage isn't just a monetization strategy. It's a psychological intervention designed to create anticipation, build habits, and prevent burnout from overuse.

Or consider their mascot Beats, the half-ant, half-robot character that appears in retention emails looking sad when users haven't coded in days. This isn't just branding—it's emotional manipulation in service of behavior change. Users return not because of rational feature comparisons, but because they feel something toward this character.

Even their influencer marketing strategy, with its focus on short-form video content on TikTok and Instagram, reflects psychological insight. These platforms aren't just distribution channels—they're environments where users are already in discovery mode, emotionally open, and primed for instant gratification.

Every B2C product decision carries psychological weight. The colors you choose, the copy you write, the sounds your app makes, the timing of your notifications—all of it shapes how users feel, which determines whether they return.

The Responsibility That Comes With Daily Engagement

Barak's comment about responsibility isn't abstract philosophy. It has real implications for how you build products.

When you're part of someone's daily life, you have power to shape their days for better or worse. A poorly timed notification can ruin someone's flow state. An addictive engagement pattern can steal time from more important activities. A shame-based retention strategy can damage self-esteem.

Coddy's mission—turning code learning into a daily hobby—explicitly embraces this responsibility. They're not just teaching programming skills. They're attempting to reshape how people spend their time, what activities they find rewarding, and potentially their career trajectories.

With that kind of influence comes the obligation to consider: are we making people's lives genuinely better?

This question matters more in B2C than B2B because the consequences are more personal. When B2B software fails, companies lose efficiency. When B2C products fail, individuals lose time, money, or emotional wellbeing.

Building Habits Without Exploitation

One of the tensions in B2C product development is between building engagement and avoiding exploitation. You want users to develop habits around your product, but you don't want those habits to be harmful.

Coddy's approach offers a useful model. Their freemium energy system deliberately limits daily usage to about 15 minutes for free users. While this serves monetization goals, it also prevents the kind of binge behavior that can turn learning into obligation.

The daily limit encourages consistency without excess. Users build habits without burning out. It's engagement design that respects boundaries.

This contrasts with products that optimize purely for time spent, encouraging endless scrolling or gaming sessions that extend far beyond what's beneficial. Those products might generate impressive engagement metrics, but they often make people feel worse about themselves.

The question every B2C founder should ask: if users spent less time with our product but felt better about that time, would we consider that success?

Creating Genuine Value in Daily Life

Barak's emphasis on becoming "a good part of someone else's life" sets a high bar. Not just a part of their life—a good part.

This means thinking beyond metrics like daily active users or session length. It means asking qualitative questions that are harder to measure:

• Do users feel proud of their progress with our product?
• Does engaging with our product leave them energized or depleted?
• Would users recommend our product because it genuinely improved their lives, or because we've gamified referrals?
• If we shut down tomorrow, would users miss us for what we enabled, or just for the habit we created?

These questions don't appear in most startup dashboards, but they determine long-term sustainability. Products that make people's lives genuinely better earn loyalty, word-of-mouth growth, and resilience against competitors.

Products that extract attention without delivering proportional value might grow quickly, but they struggle to maintain momentum when users realize they're not benefiting.

The Emotional Architecture of B2C Products

Jason observed that B2C requires thinking "psychologically, what is the psychology of the users? How am I making them feel with the design choices that I make?"

This emotional architecture spans every touchpoint:

Onboarding: Does the first experience make users feel welcome and capable, or overwhelmed and confused?

Progression: Do users feel a sense of advancement and mastery, or stuck and frustrated?

Setbacks: When users struggle or fail, do they feel motivated to try again, or defeated?

Success: When users achieve goals, do they feel genuinely proud, or does the accomplishment feel hollow?

Community: If your product has social features, do users feel connected and supported, or judged and compared?

Every B2C product creates emotional experiences, whether founders design them intentionally or not. The question is whether you're architecting those experiences deliberately to support user wellbeing, or stumbling into them accidentally.

The Long Game: Building Trust

Barak's perspective—viewing B2C products as parts of people's lives rather than just revenue sources—reflects long-term thinking that many startups lack.

In the short term, you can grow through aggressive tactics: pushy upsells, manipulative dark patterns, guilt-based retention, addictive hooks. These might boost quarterly metrics.

But in the long term, user trust determines sustainability. When users feel that a product genuinely cares about their wellbeing, they forgive bugs, tolerate price increases, and defend you in online discussions. When they feel exploited, they leave at the first opportunity.

Coddy's approach to hiring—investing heavily in finding people who care deeply about the mission and viewing employees as family—reflects this same long-term orientation. Building a product that improves people's lives requires a team that genuinely believes in that goal.

What "Extraordinary" Means in B2C

Barak's closing thought was about becoming "extraordinary" by being a good part of users' lives.

This reframes what extraordinary means for B2C products. It's not necessarily having the most users, the highest valuation, or the fastest growth. It's having a meaningful positive impact on the people who choose to spend their limited time and attention with you.

An extraordinary B2C product might be one that helps people learn skills that change their careers. Or one that makes daily routines more joyful. Or one that connects people in ways that enrich their relationships.

The extraordinary products are the ones users remember years later, not because of clever marketing, but because they genuinely made life better.

Key Takeaways

• B2C products become parts of users' daily lives, creating both opportunities and responsibilities that don't exist in B2B software
• Design every element—from energy systems to mascot personalities—with psychological impact in mind, not just functional utility
• Building habits is valuable, but only when those habits genuinely improve users' lives rather than exploiting attention for engagement metrics
• Ask qualitative questions beyond standard metrics: Do users feel better after engaging with your product? Would they miss it for the right reasons?
• Trust earned through genuinely caring about user wellbeing creates long-term sustainability that aggressive growth tactics cannot
• Extraordinary B2C products aren't defined by user counts or valuations, but by meaningful positive impact on the people who use them
• Building teams who genuinely believe in improving users' lives is essential for creating products that do

Listen to the full conversation with Barak Glanz on the Levels Podcast to hear more insights on building B2C products that become meaningful parts of millions of people's lives.