"Keep Them Coming Back: Insights for Product-Minded Founders on Creating Habit-Making Products & Understanding Human Psychology"

"Keep Them Coming Back: Insights for Product-Minded Founders on Creating Habit-Making Products & Understanding Human Psychology"

In today's competitive market, it's not enough for a product to simply function well. Users want more than just functionality - they want to feel connected, entertained, and like they belong somewhere. As a founder, it's crucial to understand the emotional experience your product provides and engineer it to keep users coming back.

One common mistake that startups make is focusing too much on the hard aspects of their product, such as features, functionality, and performance. While these are important, they pale in comparison to how the user feels when using the product. If the user doesn't feel that "wow" moment, then it's all luck.

To create that "wow" moment and engineer for it, founders need clarity on what emotional experiences make users say "wow" and share their experiences with others. By understanding how your product makes people feel, you can build features that indulge in playful exploration, create moments of pleasant surprise, and provide a sense of control and flow.

However, it's not just about what users want or need. It's about how they feel. By understanding their pain points and showing them a way forward that takes away the pain and gives them a superpower they've never had before, you can make your product feel important in their lives.

Creating a habit is one of the most powerful competitive advantages a product can have. When a user forms a habit around a product, they don't even consider whether the competition is making a better product. Therefore, it's crucial to design engagement into the product itself, providing real lasting value and ensuring that the behavior occurs with sufficient frequency.

In order to make the key behavior or habit as easy as possible, it's important to design for motivation, ability, and prompts. The easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it. By using psychology principles like variable rewards and the ability chain, you can increase motivation and make the behavior easier to adopt.

Another key aspect is understanding human psychology and applying it to your product. Great founders are like psychologists, studying people and understanding their emotional values and desires. By tapping into these insights, you can create products that resonate with users on a deeper level.

When looking for traction, it's not just about the big numbers. It's about the depth of connection with your early users. If you have a small group of people who swear by your product and use it daily because it solves a problem for them, you have the potential to expand that connection to a larger audience.