"Keep Them Coming Back: 23 Habit-Making Insights for Product-Minded Founders"

"Keep Them Coming Back: 23 Habit-Making Insights for Product-Minded Founders"
✨ Wellness Wisdom vol.31: a mental model for habits & self-actualization

Does your product motivate and reward people to keep coming back? Users want to experience connection, they want to be entertained, they want to feel like they belong somewhere. Often startups focus too much on what it does and the hard aspects of the feature, the functionality, the performance. You forget that, if the user doesn’t feel that, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what the user feels when using it. When startups are not doing well, it’s very often because nobody cares about you. You can do whatever you want, but nobody cares. However, when you begin doing something that matters, you’re going to get bombarded by opportunities. If you don’t have clarity on your “Wow” moment, then it’s all luck. If you have clarity on them as a Founder in terms of what they are, what is that emotional experience that makes someone say, “Wow,” and tell their friends about what they’re doing, then you can engineer for it, you can build for it, and you can plan for it. If you don’t have that clarity, then it’s all luck.

How important it is to have awareness of how your product makes people feel. A lot of how products take off is in how they make you feel. It helps if you’re a Founder to try and be that user yourself, to be able to feel, moment to moment, how your own product is making you react. Don’t focus on what users want or need, instead obsess over how they feel. Goals Emotions Toys Control Flow Consider all the features of your own product. Do they indulge in playful exploration? Are they fun even without a goal? Do they create moments of pleasant surprise? The real question is: Are people using the product at the frequency and timing that we want them? People have very limited attention and time. If we design with that in mind, I think we’ll make much more progress.

50% of the design is the design. 50% of the design is the story behind the design. You have to first have a true story. Even better, underpromise in the story and overdeliver in the experience. Give your customer a new superpower. Really understand your customer and speak their language. What is their pain? Understand their pain. Remind them of their pain. And then show them the way forward that takes away the pain — and gives them a superpower they’ve never had before. You also need to make people feel, “Oh, this is important. It’s important in my life.” You have to remember that not everybody around the table is going to think the same way. What’s rational to one person is emotional to another. Habit is one competitive moat. In third party studies, when we compare the Google search results to Bing search results and you strip out the branding, so people don’t know which is which, it’s a 50, 50 preference split. People can’t tell the difference. And yet we Google it. When you form a habit in a consumer’s mind, I call this the monopoly of the mind, they don’t even consider whether the competition is making a better product. What you can’t buy is engagement, that has to be designed into the product. One, it has to actually satisfy a user need. This is not mind control. You can’t get people to do something that they themselves don’t want to do. It doesn’t work that way. It has to provide real lasting value because people aren’t dumb. Their product doesn’t have a hope of forming a habit if the behavior does not occur with sufficient frequency. People aren’t using the product like they expected, and they don’t know why. So, in that case, you can use the hook model as a diagnostic tool to figure out what’s deficient. Lewin’s equation, the easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it. So, if we can make that key behavior, the key habit as easy as possible to do, users will more likely do that intended behavior. It’s using that same psychology of searching and searching for that next variable reward. The more data, the more content, the more followers, the more reputation you accrue on a platform, the stickier it becomes. The more you invest in it, the more value is stored in that product. A behavior (B) happens when motivation (M) to do the behavior, ability (A) to do the behavior, and a prompt (P) to trigger the behavior come together. The prompt is the cue, the reminder, the call to action. If any one of those things is missing, the behavior will not happen. The more people (1) stretch their finances, (2) put in physical effort, (3) put in mental effort, (4) make time, and (5) adjust their routine to do something, the more motivated they’re to do it. These five components are a model I call the ability chain. If you can define some unique form of proof of work, then you may have something that jumpstarts a new game. You have to define the restriction so enough people feel a sense of progression. So, you need a challenge, but you also need to give people hope that they can overcome that challenge with enough time or enough improvement in their skill level. A younger generation in the U.S. is actually very attuned to the emotional value and the status that comes from ownership of virtual goods, whether it’s in video games or elsewhere. I think the best Founders, especially in the consumer space, are great studies of humanity. They are great studies of people and they are really great psychologists. Evan Spiegel when he was talking about the early days of Snapchat, he very much sounded like a psychologist too. He talked about why deletion by default changes the entire way that you perceive the person on the other side and how you experience that human connection. Some people who come to technology are architects. They think about building cities, they think about planning. Some people are psychologists, and they think about people. I think these insights about humanity need to be applied, technology is just the enabler. One thing I always looked for was somebody writing a new trend where if they got it right, they could actually own a new habit formation in the future. A habit that starts small but can snowball to become a new center of gravity for that new habit or behavior. I look for products with habits that users have top of mind and want to do often. When I’m looking at a company, I usually look for a little bit of traction where there’s a small group of people who you’re completely solving something for already, who swear by your product. Your early users will hopefully say, “Every day I check into this product because it does this thing for me.” When I look for traction, I don’t care about the big numbers per se. I care about the depth of the numbers for the people who’ve already converted to your product. Because, if you have that, then you have a chance to take that deep meaningful connection with some people and expand that to a lot more.

"✨ Wellness Wisdom vol.31: a mental model for habits & self-actualization"

Only 9% of us will be able to stick with our new year resolutions. In other words, discipline is something you do, and choose to do; motivation is a thing that can come and go, which you cannot choose to do or control. Focus on building disciplined habits instead. Get specific in what “discipline” will look like for your specific goal. Schedule it in your calendar. It takes 21 days for a new habit to form. As you embark on the first 66 days, you will inevitably traverse the “Valley of Pain”. Fear & Resistance. A rule of thumb: The more scared you are of a work or a calling, the more sure you can be that you have to do it. The more important the accomplishment is to the evolution of your soul, the more resistance you will experience facing it. But ultimately it is taking away time from you actually doing the work. Begin. We owe it to those who have left us prematurely, to make the best use of our time today. Sharing your goals tricks us into our ego being satisfied with others perceiving us that we’re x, ultimately before you deceive anyone else, you first have to lie to yourself. Like I mentioned earlier - it’s hard, if not impossible, to control our thoughts but we can control our behaviors. To achieve success in any long term pursuit, perhaps the most important attribute is simply showing up. Sometimes when we are feeling down and unmotivated, the best thing we can do to change our mental state is to change our physical state. The action of discipline is needed to traverse the “valley of pain”, leading us to the land of “feeling good”, thereby solidifying our habit. As our disciplined actions turn into habits with the balm of dopamine, their summation becomes our identity. Habits fuel identity in our quest of self-actualization - to not just shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. The important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. Why is this so important? Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which,