How and why to use the default adoption trick

TL;DR: Feature adoption often fails because products require users to discover and enable functionality. Jaryd Hermann argues for defaulting features to 'on' which starts adoption at 100% instead of 0%, eliminates discovery friction, accelerates feedback loops, and forces product discipline—you only build what genuinely helps most users. The approach requires extra validation upfront since risk is higher with immediate widespread exposure, but provides dramatically faster learning and impact measurement. Best features become indispensable parts of the workflow that users can't imagine living without, like Gmail's Smart Compose or Spotify's Autoplay. Substack exemplifies this strategy by defaulting all growth features (localized pricing, recommendations) to on, creating seamless value layers.