Turn signups into users who stick.

I'm Dalton Hertel. I find out why your users leave, then design the changes that keep them. Every fix I recommend comes out of behavioral psychology, so there's a reason behind it beyond my taste.

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For founders and product teams who are tired of watching users sign up and vanish.

Portrait of Dalton Hertel

Built and advised at

  • Raptor Maps
  • San Diego Climate Week
  • Climatebase

An unsolicited teardown

I tore down Partiful's RSVP flow, then sent it to their CEO as a Partiful invite.

I moved to San Diego knowing almost nobody. Partiful is a good part of how I built a social life here, and it kept giving me FOMO every time I missed something.

So I went looking for why it worked on me. I spent time inside the invite and RSVP flow and wrote up what Partiful gets right along with where it leaves value on the table. One of those recommendations I built as a working Typeform. Then I sent the whole thing to their CEO through an actual Partiful invite.

What Partiful gets right

  • Replying takes one tap

    Spark Effect

    Nobody downloads an app to RSVP, so the effort sits near zero at the exact moment you ask someone to commit.

  • The guest list stays locked until you answer

    Curiosity Gap, Commitment & Consistency, Social Proof

    You want to know who else is going and the only way to find out is to commit. Seeing that list afterward makes you more likely to turn up.

Where I'd push it

  • Ask people what they're here for

    Investment Loops

    A short questionnaire would make matching much richer, and it settles a question the product team is probably still arguing about, which is whether people come here to throw parties or to meet someone. I built this one as a live Typeform so they could try it.

  • Let digital cards carry money

    Variable Reward, Cashless Effect, Peak-End Rule

    The best part of getting a card in the mail is the cash inside it. Venmo inside a Partiful card brings that back, and the reveal has to earn its moment with an animation you tear open.

Why it matters

Every one of these is a small change to how a flow asks somebody to act. That kind of change moves activation and retention more reliably than the features teams spend months arguing over, and it costs a fraction as much to ship.

Read the full teardown, all seven findings

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How I work

People decide with emotion and explain it with logic afterward.

Most of what drives conversion and retention happens somewhere the user can't see. People commit or hesitate for reasons they'd struggle to explain if you asked them. I spent years in growth watching that play out. So I find the places where your product is fighting human nature, and I redesign those moments to work with it instead.

A few of the levers

  • The decoy effect

    An asymmetrically worse option makes a target option look obviously right.

  • Center-stage pricing

    A three-tier structure quietly steers most people toward the middle option. Look at my pricing below. It's doing exactly this.

  • Peak-end rule

    People remember the most intense moment of an experience and the way it ended. Everything in between fades.

  • Loss aversion

    The fear of losing progress or status is a stronger motivator than the promise of gain.

Free, built from the same 106 principles

Run the teardown yourself.

I packaged my method as a Claude skill. Hand it a screenshot of any product screen and it runs the same teardown I'd run for a client.

It finishes with a ranked backlog table you can take straight into sprint planning, and it tells you what it couldn't work out from a single screenshot.

  • 106 behavioral principles, each with a takeaway you can act on.
  • Three lenses on every screen: what's costing you users, what's flat that could delight, what won't bring them back.
  • Output you can ship: named component, suggested copy, and the metric that would tell you the fix worked.
  • Works on any plan. Install it as a Claude skill, or paste the single-file version into any chat.

Get the skill

A Claude skill you can use on any of your workflows or UI screenshots.

Engagements

Start small. Go deeper once it's working.

  • The Teardown

    $750

    A fixed-scope audit of one core flow. You get a findings doc showing where users drop off and why, each answer mapped to a named principle and ranked by what to fix first.

  • Recommended

    The Sprint

    $3,000

    One to two weeks across the whole user journey. I hold working sessions with your team and leave you with a ranked roadmap of changes you can ship. This one suits teams who already know they have a leak.

  • Fractional Product Psychologist

    Let's scope it

    Ongoing advisory, embedded part-time with your team. I review flows while they're still being designed and pressure-test product decisions against behavioral evidence. Over time your team starts doing it without me. Monthly retainer, sized to how deep you want me in it.

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The person behind the method

Six years in growth taught me the same lesson over and over. The winners understand people.

I've watched things succeed and fail from close range, and whatever succeeded had some element of human emotional alchemy in it, built by people who knew decisions get made on feeling. Reading Kahneman and Thaler turned that instinct into something I could use. Software keeps getting cheaper to make, so the world is about to fill up with bloat. I'd rather spend my time on the software that solves a real human problem, and I don't have much patience for mediocrity here.

  • Raptor Comply at Raptor Maps

    Took a renewable-energy cybersecurity and compliance product from zero to one in under a year and onboarded the first paying clients.

  • Climatebase

    Advised several pre-seed startups on distribution and ICP research through the fellowship there.

  • San Diego Climate Week via Seed Consulting Group

    Advised the inaugural event on gamified engagement and partnership strategy. It drew more than 5,500 attendees across 120 events.

If you're building something thoughtful, working in climate, or trying to figure out how to move faster with AI, I'd like to talk.

More on how I got here

Dalton Hertel, San Diego, CA

Your users are telling you something when they leave.

Thirty minutes on a call is the fastest way to find out whether this can move your numbers. You'll get my read on where your product is leaking and what I'd do about it.

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