Topic: getting customers addicted to your product. Nir Eyal is a former video game industry employee who wrote a book in 2014 called Hooked. His theory, called the Hooked Model, is that you should make your product habit forming. Your product should consist of an infinite cycle of trigger or an itch, that causes an action, a Pavlovian response, followed by a variable reward. All of this is calculated to increase the user's investment in the product, causing the user to return, repeat and deepen their cycle of addiction. Now let's look at the Hooked Model, right? So on the left here, right, a couple questions you can think about is, what internal trigger is the product addressing? Two, what external trigger gets the user to the product. So, for example, let's talk about Instagram, right? Super popular. A lot of Instagram users are repeat users, right? If you just look at the number of posts or interactions that they have with other users on the platform, it really suggests that it is a habit forming or addictive product, right? So let's use that product to answer these questions. One, what internal trigger is a product addressing? Well, let's say I am an Instagram user. The fact that I can get people to view my posts, the fact that I can grow my social media presence by getting more people to follow my post, to look at my pictures, that satisfies my need to grow my network, right? So that's internal trigger. Now for external trigger, what gets the user to continue posting on Instagram? Well, certainly that is the actual number of people who end up following, which might be influencers, right? If you look at influencers, they have millions upon millions of followers and that certainly is an external trigger, right? For example, the ability to go on vacations, get sponsored vacation stays or hotel stays. Those are all external triggers to that influencer, or ultimately at its core, the Instagram user to continue posting on Instagram. All right, let's look at question number three. What is the simplest behavior in anticipation of award, right? So let's forget about long posts, or let's say a lot of people on Instagram come up with fancy videos that look amazing, right? The simplest behavior there is really just posting, right? Adding a picture. Maybe commenting on someone's picture, or replying to a comment. Four, is the reward fulfilling, yet leaves the user wanting more? Obviously, like I said, for some of the most popular influencers, they get media deals, they get book deals, they get featured on tons of advertisements, right? And it's for a lot of those influencers, the reason they become influencers is it's a huge source of income, right? Many people simply have their entire livelihood on Instagram. So the reward there is potential livelihood, or for folks who have full time jobs, right, the need the need to feel loved, appreciated, understood, have a following. So the reward is really that, right? Building a following, having people engage with you, having people who know who you are, right? And the wanting more part, right, is simply that the more you post, the more engagement you get to your profile. The more you comment, the more replies you have, right? The more following you have. And so it's really a effort that it's a network effect, right? You have to continue doing something, in order to continue gaining those awards. So absolutely, it definitely fulfills number four, which is it leaves the user wanting more, that's why they come back, that's why they keep on engaging. And then lastly, five, what bit of work is done to increase the likelihood of returning? Well, so I'm sure that goes back to the Instagram team, where we had actually one of our guest lecturers was a product manager at Instagram, right? She went into some of the metrics around users retention. So if you look at the number of features that Instagram has produced lately, the ability to shoot entire videos, or Instagram stories, the ability to enhance your photos before uploading to Instagram, all of the ecosystem applications that are related to Instagram, all of that makes the process of adding more of yourself to the Instagram platform that much easier, right? And so that's the effort on behalf of the Instagram team to keep people coming back to the platform, to make it more seamless, to make it integrated and a habit forming product. So that folks is a great example of thinking through a product that is successful, because it's able to hook users. Now you can use this with YouTube, with AWS, for example, right? It's the same process. Go through those questions systematically and I'm curious to see what you come up with. So if the model sounds uncomfortable or dark, that's because it is. You could argue that the hooked model itself is morally neutral. Just as there are products that addict users and destroy their lives and their communities. In theory, you could also make beneficial products like fitness apps, think ClassPass, that use the cycle of addiction based on let's say an example, the number of classes you go to, the number of workout buddies you build and the closer you are to your goal weight or your fitness level, right? And that cycle of addiction is actually a positive example that actually ends up improving users' lives. Now, there's even a Habit Summit, where product managers gather in San Francisco, to discuss new and better ways to addict their users.
