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

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

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.

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.

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.

Three actionable advice before conclusion:

1. Understand the emotional value of your product: Focus on how your product makes people feel rather than what they want or need. Design for emotional experiences that create a sense of connection, entertainment, and belonging.

2. Make it easy for users to engage: Simplify the key behaviors or habits you want users to adopt. The easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it. Use prompts or cues to trigger the desired behavior.

3. Provide real lasting value: Ensure that your product satisfies a genuine user need and provides meaningful value. People won't form habits if the behavior doesn't occur frequently. Use the hook model as a diagnostic tool to identify deficiencies and improve user engagement.

In conclusion, building a successful product requires a deep understanding of human psychology and the ability to create habits that keep users coming back. By focusing on emotional experiences, simplifying key behaviors, and providing real value, founders can create products that form lasting habits and foster user engagement. Remember, it's not just about what your product does, but how it makes users feel.