Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions.

However, products utilizing infinite variability stand a better chance of holding on to users’ attention, while those with finite variability must constantly reinvent themselves just to keep pace.

If] you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side.

Notable companies were making hundreds of millions of dollars selling virtual cows on digital farms while advertisers were spending huge sums of money to influence people to buy whatever they were peddling. I admit I didn’t get it at first and found myself standing at the water’s edge wondering, “How do they do it?”

“Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time … Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”

companies generally use paid triggers to acquire new users and then leverage other triggers to bring them back.

Finding customers’ internal triggers requires learning more about people than what they can tell you in a survey, though. It requires digging deeper to understand how your users feel.

Following the trigger comes the action: the behavior done in anticipation of a reward.

Users who find a product that alleviates their pain will form strong, positive associations with the product over time.