Most teams act like the wow moment lives inside the product. In 2025, it starts upstream: on the SERP, in your Google Business Profile, inside early reviews, and increasingly in what AI assistants say about you. But even that's old thinking. The real wow moments are happening in Reddit threads, Discord servers, WhatsApp groups, and wherever else people actually talk. Those surfaces decide whether users even see your FTUE. Treat acquisition as part of the product or you'll ask onboarding to rescue a perception problem it didn't create.

Perception Is Product in a Fractured World

Humans skim. Machines summarize. Markets fragment. Trust has gone local and contextual.

The macro environment has scrambled everyone's bullshit detector. Inflation made people question every purchase. Crypto went from scam to treasury asset and back to scam depending on the week. AI went from toy to threat to tool in eighteen months. Every product claims to be "AI-powered" while every buyer wonders if they're being sold vaporware. The economic climate has people simultaneously desperate for efficiency and deeply skeptical of anything that sounds too good.

In this environment, traditional trust signals are breaking down. Reviews have fallen from 79% trust in 2020 to 42% in 2025 because everyone knows they're gamed. Google Business Profile still matters for local discovery, but it's becoming just another checkbox. AI assistants are setting narratives, with 34% of U.S. adults having used ChatGPT (58% for those under 30), but people are learning these systems hallucinate.

The real trust now lives in places you can't fully control. A Reddit thread where someone describes their actual problem and your product genuinely solved it. A Discord server where power users share workflows. A WhatsApp group where someone screenshots their actual results. These aren't reviews; they're stories. And stories are what actually change behavior.

Where Wow Actually Begins (The Real Version)

The Reddit Thread That Sells Better Than Your Homepage

Here's what actually happens: Someone posts in r/smallbusiness about their specific inventory nightmare. Three comments down, someone mentions your product as an aside in a longer story about fixing their operations. The OP clicks through, skims your landing page for thirty seconds to confirm it's real, and buys.

Your landing page didn't convert them. Reddit did. The landing page just needed to not fuck it up.

This is happening thousands of times and you can't track it. The wow moment was in that comment thread where someone explained exactly how they used your thing to solve exactly the problem OP has. Your job is to make sure when they hit your site, it confirms what they already believe.

Defend Your Name Everywhere (Not Just Google)

Yes, you still need brand ads. If you don't bid on your own brand terms, competitors will frame you for your own users. But that's table stakes.

The real defense happens in the spaces where opinions form. When someone searches your name on Reddit, what comes up? When they ask about you in Discord, who answers? When ChatGPT describes your category, does it mention you? When someone posts in a Telegram group asking for recommendations, are you part of the vocabulary?

You can't control these narratives directly. But you can make sure