The Trust Battery

Tobi Lütke has this idea called the trust battery.

He uses it for his AI agents at Shopify.

The agent starts at 20% - Every consistent day adds 1%

But a single bad day costs 5%.

So there’s 5x asymmetric in trust - can only go up one, but can quickly go down 5.

I think we can think about work with clients in the same way.

It’s not news to coaches that trust is finite, we all know that.

The interesting thing is the maths - that 3 months of consistent, careful, high-effort work can earn you 90 days of +1%

But one misjudged call can wipe it out quite quickly

I think as an industry we make the mistake of assuming that client trust is binary - ‘They hired me, therefore they trust me’

I don’t think new client trust starts at 50%

I think it starts closer to 20%.

They’ve credited you for not disappointing them yet - which means your first job probably isn’t to shove loads of ‘value’ in their face

It’s to not break the very specific provisional trust that’s been extended.

Yet if you think about coaching - most coaches front-load the difficult work, with a healthy side of tons of paperwork, resources etc.

Which might work for some clients, for others it might be putting a drain on the trust battery.

I think the trust battery metaphor is a nice one for coaches to think about - and to try and influence

How does my content earn trust? My sales process? Onboarding? Coaching? Offboarding?

In a trust economy and service industry - do we think enough about trust?

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