Businesses Lied To You About Friction
Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash
Friction, at its most basic, is all the stuff that prevents people from doing things. The self-help writer Bob Sutton described it as “simply putting obstacles in front of people that slow them down, that make their jobs more difficult and maybe a little bit more frustrating.”
The traditional business argument is that it makes some sense to want to remove friction. If a customer has a barrier to purchasing a product, then they are going to often move on to another product that doesn’t have that barrier. As a result of this logic, there is now an explicit goal by many executives and founders to eliminate all friction in the customer or user experience. Then-CEO of HubSpot, Brian Halligan, highlighted this perspective when he infamously quipped in 2019 during the company’s Inbound conference: “Dollars flow where the friction is low.”
Reality is, of course, more complicated than this truism, as companies have never just made money by providing a seamless customer experience (see monopolies, price fixing, etc). It’s a fiction — and we will go over the specifics of how and why soon — but just keep in mind that this rhetoric manages to accomplish a very interesting thing.
By not specifying which types of friction are bad and good, your average capitalist manages to make invisible the friction they use to earn a profit.
We don’t want to lose all friction
It’s important to note from the outset that not all friction is bad. Some friction can even be beneficial to other areas of your life.
For example, a speed bump increases the time it takes to get people from point A to B; it increases friction, but we add speed bumps to protect people. We place them in front of school zones and residential areas to signal drivers to slow down, and there does appear to be some research backing the point that they reduce pedestrian deaths, especially for children.
Even painful friction can lead to positive development. There was an interesting bit of research presented at CES 2025 (that first came my way via the great podcast It Could Happen Here) during the dystopic panel “Raising AI Kids Responsibly” that revealed that much of Gen Z shunned the idea of chatbots taking over relationships, such as friendships. Researcher Karen Ruth Wong tells her audience during the panel:
“We asked questions like…Imagine you could have an AI trained on your preferences…They could swipe your Tinder for you. They would have the icky conversations or would go through the awkward introductions with the new person in school. And we heard some really interesting things. ‘I want to go on a bad date for myself’ and ‘I want to have that bad vacation.’ It was a really interesting sign that [for Gen Zers] being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor.”
This response flies in the face of the “dollars flow where the friction is low” argument.
Yet this hesitancy makes sense once you realize the obvious fact that friction is, at a certain point, what a lot of life is. If you take out all the uncomfortable parts of existence — the tedium of waiting, the pain of heartbreak, the shame of being wrong — then you not only remove most of life’s moments, but you deny the self the ability to learn and grow from that discomfort (no shit).
These participants wanted to experience the friction that comes with deteriorating relationships and worried about how technology like AI could affect their humanity. As Karen Ruth Wong continues on that panel:
“There is something about designing for friction in our age of optimization…about the joy of overcoming challenges and the joy of moving through your first breakup that makes you into a person….manytimes people who are designing technology assume that the smoothest possible path is the best path, and there is some pushback there.”
And honestly, these participants are right to be pushing back because when we try to take out too much friction, it can have a detrimental impact on the skillsets we use to navigate the world.
With AI specifically, right now, the biggest problem is not Skynet or the singularity but that eventually (very quickly, in fact), people become complacent and stop monitoring its outputs. There was a paper about Generative AI that came out of Carnegie Mellon University that made headlines for concluding that:
“…while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort. When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking shifts from information gathering to information verification; from problem-solving to AI response integration; and from task execution to task stewardship.”
In other words, the technology is making people less likely to think for themselves.
This hurdle is why people like me bemoan AI eliminating people’s ability to draft an essay or an email anymore. I don’t care about “cheating,” preserving the grading system, or the sanctity of emails (whatever the hell that means). My concern is that people are losing the ability to construct and reason through an argument. In wanting to get rid of the friction that comes with researching, outlining, and drafting their points, they give up control of the very output meant to represent them, outsourcing their thoughts to an algorithm they neither know nor care to understand.
We need to be careful that in our efforts to make life simpler (for capitalists to make money from us), we don’t lose the friction that makes us cautious, pushes us to learn, and ultimately defines our humanity.
The lie of businesses removing friction
This reality is why I am skeptical when CEOs wax poetic about removing friction because it’s neither possible nor desirable to remove all of it. There are good types of friction and bad types of friction, and which is which very much depends on your perspective — not just in business, but in life.
Let’s take the example of HubSpot, whose CEO made the “dollars flow where the friction is low” comment. They are a software company that specializes in marketing, sales, and customer service (i.e., Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, etc.). The logic of Brian Halligan is that they should be making excellent products that are so frictionless that customers freely choose them year after year for their superb performance.
However, that’s just not true. Their products are of dubious quality. HubSpot has a D- on the Better Business Bureau for a “failure to respond to 27 complaints filed against [it],” and customers are quick to bring up its clunky usability. As one Redditor remarks of its [Content Management System], i.e., business jargon for a platform that lets you organize content (often exclusively digital):
“…it’s just a horrible experience. I could easily build something so much better and easier with nearly any other tool and just connect it to Hubspot. Just doing simple things like changing colors for headers is a major [pain in the ass]. It’s also just really limited. You can’t design anything fancy with it (without doing major HTML work). What am I missing here?”
Yet HubSpot continues to be successful because it has reduced friction in one key area: making money.
HubSpot has a free Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system — i.e., how businesses organize their interactions with their customers — that is easily integrated into a lot of the web, with users able to opt into paid applications or its marketplace if they want full functionality (i.e., a freemium model). The friction for signing up and paying for the product is low, but friction has been added via a paywall to ensure that customers must fork over money if they want to use the product’s more useful features or even just some of its features.
This is what Halligan (who, by the way, was internally sanctioned in 2015 for allegedly trying to use extortion to obtain a draft of a former employee’s memoir) means when he talks about removing friction. He’s speaking about the friction between a company and a sale. All other types of friction are not being eliminated and, in some cases, even being exacerbated.
Let’s use another more extreme example of when a company’s removal or addition of friction has a detrimental impact on your life. Intuit, which you may famously know for making the software TurboTax, makes it very easy to sign up for and navigate TurboTax when it comes to paying around $60 to $150 to file a simple state and federal tax return. But for years, when it came to customers finding the free version of its software, the company used ‘dark patterns’ (i.e., deceptive design patterns attempting to trick users into a certain type of behavior) to navigate users away from that option. Users would click on TurboxTax’s ‘free’ version only to have to eventually pay money for it.
When the news organization ProPublica brought this reality to light in 2019, it prompted public outcry and eventual regulation from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which prohibited Intuit in 2024 from using the word free unless “it is free for all consumers or it discloses clearly and conspicuously and in close proximity to the ‘free’ claim the percentage of taxpayers or consumers that qualify.” Intuit, rather than respond to criticism, withdrew from the IRS Free File program in 2021, a public-private partnership meant to connect households that make below a certain income level with services that actually let them file their taxes for free.
To make money, private tax preparers such as Intuit added friction to the customer experience, and when they realized the government was going to regulate that friction away, they removed functionality for their users.
This pattern of relying on friction to turn a profit applies on the macro level as well. Many countries outside the US do not have such a complex tax system where they have to individually calculate how much they owe their government. Many governments, including ours, often already collect this information, and in some polities, tax season merely requires citizens to double-check their government’s work (not filing a separate claim).
Not ours, though, and that’s because Intuit and H&R Block have spent a fortune lobbying the government — millions in 2024 alone— to make our taxes more complicated. The IRS Free File program was itself a half-measure lobbied for by Intuit and others to keep the IRS out of the tax preparation industry so that businesses could reap the benefits of this sector instead. Companies provide these free services listed on a poorly promoted and maintained IRS website and then spend all their efforts pushing customers, including the large percentage of Americans eligible for these free services, to their paid software.
To make money, this industry added friction to our everyday lives so that a private tax-filing industry could exist in the first place.
From insurance companies to rental properties, many businesses exist not because they provide a seamless customer experience but rather because they are taking advantage of or adding to frictions that they have no intention of getting rid of.
In fact, if we were to remove such frictions, they would cease to exist as businesses.
A friction(ful) conclusion
The business rhetoric on friction is a lie. When CEOs monologue about removing friction, they are speaking quite narrowly about the friction that allows them to make a sale.
Yet, frequently, that is not the same thing as removing or adding frictions that are good for you as an individual: the frictions that, once added or removed, make us safer, the frictions that allow us to learn, the frictions that make it easier and more enjoyable to interact with other humans.
Most of the time, in fact, the frictions that are great for you as a person are terrible for business, and vice versa.
As a result, businesses spend a large amount of political capital, removing beneficial friction and adding unbeneficial ones. We used the example of the tax preparer industry, but this can be extrapolated to healthcare, property, and pretty much any sector of the US economy. Businesses add friction (i..e make our lives harder) all the time to earn money, and pretend as though it’s making our lives better.
Yet friction’s goodness or badness is a matter of debate, and if you are a regular person, chances are that your definition of good friction does not align with the Brian Halligan’s of the world.