Summer Sunshine at Subconscious

July Newsletter

Author

Alex Ross
July 08, 2026

Hi Friends,

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July! While the fireworks were going off outside, we set off a few of our own. Here's what we've been up to:

Recent Experiment:

We ran a retinol study on Subconscious.ai with 25-40 year old women in New York. The brands that win don't create excitement. They remove doubt.

Here's what the data shows:

→ $18 retinol scored worse than $395. She knows what a serious formula costs. Below $50, the price creates doubt before she reads the label.

→ La Roche-Posay Laboratoire Dermatologique's derm endorsement is a risk transfer. If 90,000 dermatologists trust it for post-procedure skin (+ added bonus of the French effect), her doubt is gone.

→ Paula Begoun spent 30 years publishing what beauty brands didn't want consumers to know. You can print "1% Retinol" on anything. On Paula's Choice Skincare, she believes it. Consumers who grew up on viral claims are now reaching for honesty.

→ Medicube did $103M on TikTok Shop showing results through influencers, community, and social proof. And yet it's always on sale. Virality moves product. It doesn't hold willingness to pay.

FASHIONPHILE's Sarah David once asked: "Are you renting eyeballs or do you actually have fans?" When the ad stops, if you don't have sales, you don't have a brand. Excitement rents eyeballs. Trust builds fans. Checkout shows the difference.

New Team Member

We are thrilled to welcome Theadora Bulajic as Head of CPG! Theadora is a CPG founder and has already been deeply focused on bringing Subconscious to new CPG customers!

Causality Education

Question: What happened to teenagers in 2012?

Notice the causal claim in that question. Plenty of things rose in the 2010s: smartphone adoption, algorithmic feeds, sleep loss, helicopter parenting, political polarization, climate anxiety. A striking chart isn't proof.

The Question we Cannot Run

What would the curve above look like if smartphone-based adolescence had not happened? If Instagram had shipped with the age gates Meta's own researchers recommended? If TikTok's recommender weighted differently? If schools had banned phones in 2014?

These are counterfactuals. You cannot randomize a generation. The human-subjects experiment that would answer the question is the one we are not allowed to run. The one already running, on every adolescent alive, is the one we cannot undo.

Subconscious builds AI agents that simulate populations under conditions that did not occur. Counterfactual evidence at the scale of real markets. The same machinery that lets a brand test a campaign before launch lets a policymaker test an intervention before passing it. We're applying it to the questions human-subjects research will never run.

A Note from Subconscious:

Thank you to all of our supporters and friends! If you are interested in learning more about what we are building, please grab 20 minutes at the link below. 

Avi Yashchin

CEO, Subconscious AI