🚀 Momentum Is a Helluva Drug

These Days, Hype Is Part of the Product — Also, There's Brand New Data on How People Are (Really) Using ChatGPT

Author

Katie Perry
September 16, 2025

Welcome to Tuesday Thursday Saturday! Here, I share a snapshot of trending stories across business, tech, and culture, plus some updates from the daily financial news show I host. - KP

The Big Story: Momentum Isn’t Magic

Momentum is a helluva drug. Back in high school, I didn’t particularly enjoy physics class. But one equation stuck with me: p (momentum) = m (mass) * v (velocity).

I’m fascinated by scientific principles that apply to psychology and business, and momentum is one of those phenomena that applies to so many aspects of life. Having momentum is everything. Losing it is devastating. Keeping it might be the hardest thing of all.

Momentum is the state of forward progress toward a goal, with impacts that accelerate and compound the longer it is sustained. At any given moment in our lives, we’re gaining momentum, we’re losing it, or we’re inert. Sometimes we need more momentum, sometimes we need less. The same thing applies to business.

The term “momentum stock” applies to a company that’s experiencing accelerated market interest. It might have started with a few ardent analysts or supporters who saw promise, but eventually the excitement spreads to the point where the momentum becomes the main value prop. In the present environment, the activist movement around Opendoor is a prime example of the impact that momentum can have on the perceived value of a stock.

Momentum is also critically important to marketing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a consumer brand or building an enterprise tech company. At the end of the day, human beings make buying decisions, and they are more influenced by emotion and “vibes” than they care to admit. Making a purchase has both logical and illogical thresholds. On the logical side, you have things like price, quality, and relevance. But there are illogical components too, and one of the big ones is going to where the momentum is. People want to align with winners. They want to make decisions that get them promoted.

The tricky thing about momentum is that it’s a limited resource. Having momentum means having attention, and humans can only pay attention to so many things at once. Momentum is also perceived on a relative basis, meaning you and your top three competitors can’t possibly be all having the same momentum at the same time.

The lead story in Adweek on Sept. 15 unpacked the challenge of hype cycles as the Labubu craze slows down.

If you’re someone who cares about building a brand, whether it's around a ticker symbol or a product offering, you should also be strategizing for momentum. But how?

Manufacturing momentum

Momentum can happen through luck or other organic means, but these days, it’s more likely to be engineered. Psychologists call this the progress principle: small wins create daily motivation and creativity. If you design your systems so that progress is visible, you’re more likely to sustain the energy needed for bigger breakthroughs. 

In business, this means publicly celebrating milestones — new customers, new hires, product launches — and continuously and repeatedly tying them back to the bigger story. If the perception of your company is that you are relentless in your mission and successful at demonstrating progress, you’re doing it right.

It’s not enough to host an event or get a press hit. There is an entirely other step that comes next, which is the merchandising of the wins. How are you ensuring your employees, customers, and prospective customers see the signal? And then linking that to the other signals you’ve sent to support a larger narrative? That’s the boring side of marketing that nobody talks about, but everybody needs.

Another lever is legitimacy. Economist Michael Spence’s signaling theory suggests that roadmaps, endorsements, and scarcity can create the perception of momentum even before the underlying results are there. That’s why startups trumpet funding rounds, why artists tease album drops, and why brands lean on scarcity. These are not just marketing gimmicks. They, too, signal momentum.

Sustaining momentum

Sustaining momentum can be harder than manufacturing it, because human attention is finite and momentum is relative. This is where behavioral momentum research comes in: reinforced behaviors persist even under disruption. To keep moving, you need reinforcement loops.

In business, that’s the flywheel effect that VCs love to talk about: small, repeated actions that compound until they’re self-sustaining. In psychology, automatic behaviors that kick in without much thought once established. Studies suggest it takes around 66 days of repetition for habits to stick.

Positive emotions matter here, too. The “broaden and build theory” shows that positive affect expands our capacity for resilience, creativity, and resource-building. That means momentum is not just logical or mechanical; it’s emotional. The best organizations, and the best individuals, build rituals that reinforce joy in the process, not just the outcome.

Sustaining momentum ultimately comes down to discipline and design: break wins into smaller milestones so progress is always visible, build rituals that make progress part of the culture, keep telling the story so others feel the movement, periodically refresh your flywheel to prevent stalling, and pace yourself so energy and enthusiasm don’t burn out.

Regaining momentum

What happens when momentum breaks? Inevitably, it will. And the loss of momentum feels heavier than the gain due to negativity bias. We notice setbacks more acutely than wins, and that’s why losing momentum feels devastating. Match that with a peer or rival gaining momentum of their own, and it can be pretty damn discouraging.

So let’s talk about getting unstuck. A good place to start is reflection. Pause and ask why it was lost. Momentum doesn’t just vanish in the market; often, it slips internally. Energy dips. People get tired. Excitement fades. What once felt like a rocket ship starts to feel like a prison.

In startups, this is why turnover can be healthy. Building from scratch is brutal. People burn out, get jaded, grow cynical. None of that fuels momentum. Fresh energy matters. New hires can inject optimism and urgency that the legacy team has stopped generating.

Founders don’t have the luxury of hopping to the next gig when things feel stale. They’re tethered to the mission. That’s why they need to constantly find aspects of the business that reignite them: a new feature, a new partnership, a customer win. Some of the most resilient founders I’ve worked with aren’t delusionally optimistic. They just have the simple capacity to get excited about small things, even when they are not as excited about the bigger picture as they once were.

Bringing in outside voices can also help. This is admittedly self-serving for me to say, but consultants, agencies, and fractional resources tend to be high-energy, extroverted people who get excited about the little things. They notice progress that the core team has stopped celebrating and reframe challenges as opportunities. Ideally, that enthusiasm reinvigorates the people around them.

Momentum can be rebuilt, but not by ignoring why it was lost. You can’t just push harder on the same tired system. You restore energy, refresh the cast, and reframe the story so forward motion feels possible again.

***

At the end of the day, momentum isn’t magic; it’s mechanics, psychology, and a bit of narrative flair. The real shift is seeing momentum not as something that happens to you, but as something you build, protect, and recreate again and again.

Daily Rip Live: Elon Puts $1 Billion Back into Tesla, Opendoor Wants to Be the Shopify of Real Estate, and the Jets are SAD

I went to a Jets game, and it was the most depressing sight of my life.

Every weekday, my co-host Shay Boloor and I cover the biggest market news and events LIVE on Stocktwits’ morning show, The Daily Rip Live. Here’s what we covered on Monday’s show:

⇢ 7:15 Oracle earnings recap: Why the legacy tech giant is putting up 'video game numbers' $ORCL ( ▼ 0.91% ) and how Amazon fumbled the ball

⇢ 15:56 OpenAI is no longer exclusive with Microsoft cloud (Azure), reflecting Microsoft’s desire to transition from customer to part-owner $MSFT ( â–˛ 0.31% )  

⇢ 18:39 Google Gemini is trending in App Store, potentially signaling consumer momentum — plus, Alphabet’s TPU advantage (think of TPUs like GPUs except purpose-built for AI applications) $GOOG ( â–˛ 0.01% )  

⇢ 27:10 The UK and US are teasing a major tech deal — is big quantum news imminent?

⇢ 31:09 Larry Ellison briefly overtook Elon as the richest person alive, and Elon took that personally, making a $1B open market investment into Tesla $TSLA ( â–Ľ 1.42% )  

⇢ 36:14 My co-host Shay says betting against Elon is like betting that the Jets will win a football game. I concur: this is a sad and tragic organization to be affiliated with. | CLIP

⇢ 44:44 Opendoor goes full-platform with new CEO hire, formerly COO and product lead at Shopify — but can they land the plane? $OPEN ( ▲ 1.25% ) | CLIP

⇢ 56:35 Secretary Scott “I’m Going to Punch You in Your F—king Face” Bessent says, “Get ready with me while I save TikTok!” (Also, are they just distracting us from the lack of China progress overall?) | CLIP

⇢ 60:00 Finally, it’s a slow earnings week but a big dawg reports Wednesday: Cracker Barrel (lol) $CBRL ( 0.0% ) | CLIP

Now, Here’s a Chart

Check out this visualization of how ChatGPT is being used according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. The top two applications are practical guidance and writing-related prompts, followed by seeking info, technical help, and image creation.

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Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.