The Product Is a Decoy

I keep noticing that businesses often make money from something slightly different from what they appear to be selling. The thing on the homepage is sometimes just the mechanism that gets people into the system. A gym appears to sell exercise, but part of the business depends on people paying regularly and showing up irregularly. An airline appears to sell flights, but it can also make billions by creating loyalty points and selling them to banks. A printer may be sold cheaply because the real relationship begins when you need to keep buying ink.

Once you start looking at companies this way, the product becomes almost like a decoy. It is real and it still needs to be useful, but it may not be the most economically important part of the system. Its job can be to accumulate something else: attention, trust, prepaid cash, habits, data, distribution, unused capacity, or control over a small decision that happens repeatedly.

Costco sells groceries, but the membership fee changes the whole business. Starbucks sells coffee, but every balance loaded onto its app is money it receives before it has to make the drink. A conference sells tickets, but the more interesting asset may be a few thousand people from the same industry gathered in one building where sponsors, recruiters, and vendors can reach them. The audience pays to attend while also becoming part of what the organiser sells.

I think we usually miss this because we look at the user journey and stop there. Someone sees an ad, visits the website, signs up, buys something, uses it, and hopefully returns. Designers map this in great detail, but there is another journey happening underneath it. Money enters at a particular moment, a new dependency is created, some capacity remains unused, or another company pays for access to the behaviour the user just generated.

A gift card is a good example because the user thinks they are buying a convenient present, while the company is receiving an interest-free loan. The money arrives now and the product may be delivered months later. Some of the balance may never be used. Insurance operates a much larger version of this timing difference. Premiums are collected before claims are paid, and the money can be invested during the gap. The timing itself becomes an asset.

Airline miles are even stranger. The airline creates a unit that costs almost nothing to issue immediately, sells huge quantities of it to a bank, and later decides how difficult it will be to exchange those units for a seat. The customer experiences this as a reward programme, but underneath it is something close to a private currency system. The accumulated points also make it harder to leave because choosing another airline can feel like abandoning something you already earned.

The same thing happens through interfaces in ways that are easy to overlook. When someone saves a payment method, the company makes the next purchase easier. When they turn on notifications, the company gains a route back into their attention. When they invite a friend, they become part of the distribution system. When they create a post, review, photo, route, listing, or playlist, the platform gains more inventory. These actions look like ordinary product features, but they are also economic events.

This is where interaction design becomes much more interesting to me. The interface is not just helping someone complete a task. It is deciding how value moves between people and how visible that movement is. A default option can send millions of users toward one search engine or payment provider. A progress bar can make someone reluctant to leave. A streak can turn a tool into a habit. A points balance can turn past behaviour into future commitment.

It also explains why products sometimes start feeling worse after a company becomes successful. The original user value may have helped the business grow, but eventually the accumulated asset becomes more important than the original purpose. A social platform discovers that conflict creates more attention. A dating app discovers that users who remain single keep using the product. A subscription company discovers that forgotten renewals are profitable. The business model slowly edits the product.

This does not automatically mean the hidden money journey is bad. Some of the strongest businesses work because the two journeys support each other. A marketplace earns more when it makes transactions safer. A payment company grows when its customers sell more. A useful professional tool can attract people with a real problem and later sell them implementation, hosting, support, or compliance services. The user gets increasing value while the company builds a stronger position.

The more revealing question is whether the company makes more money when the user succeeds or when the user becomes stuck, distracted, forgetful, or dependent. The interface may look almost identical in both cases, but the incentives underneath it are completely different.

This also changes how I think about building products now that AI can generate another app, dashboard, assistant, or image tool in a few days. The interface itself is becoming easier to copy. The harder question is what the product accumulates each time someone uses it. Does it build a trusted community, a unique dataset, a recurring workflow, a distribution channel, a reputation system, or a relationship with a group that is otherwise difficult to reach?

A small map, newsletter, database, event, or free tool may look like a weak standalone business when viewed only through direct revenue. It can still create a valuable position around partnerships, research, consulting, recruiting, investment opportunities, or access to a specific community. Its job may be to make money somewhere else in the system.

So when I look at a business now, I want to map two versions of what is happening. In the first version, the user joins a gym, earns airline points, attends an event, buys a cheap machine, or uses a free tool. In the second version, the business sells unused capacity, creates future commitment, concentrates an audience, locks in replenishment purchases, or identifies someone with a valuable problem.

The homepage tells you what the company wants the customer to think they are buying. The hidden money journey tells you what the business is actually becoming richer in.

Connected reading

• The Product Happens Between the Screens
• Why Is AI Making Me Think About Business Strategy?
• The Agent Becomes Real When It Can Pay
• The Shopping List Is Becoming a Constitution

AI authorship note

This essay began with Kris Haamer noticing that many businesses earn money from something slightly different from the product they appear to sell. Kris framed the idea as two parallel systems, the visible user journey and the hidden money journey, then connected it to interaction design, platform economics and the increasing ease of building interfaces with AI. AI helped develop the examples, shape the argument, edit the article and prepare the Raw Drafts publishing files. Kris supplied the original observation, framing, voice and final editorial direction.