David Sacks explains the importance of designing a simple, repeatable "hook" — a core, believable interaction that gets users to repeatedly engage (examples: a tweet/status update; push-button ride-hailing). He argues that products need a straightforward core behavior before adding complexity, and that a strong product hook can be more valuable than a precisely identified market need. He contrasts eclectic, product-building entrepreneurs (who often discover hooks) with more analytical types (e.g., consultants/MBAs) who may struggle to produce such hooks.
Chapters
Once you sort of have an idea of what your market need is, you develop the product. And the thing I look for for a product is what I call the hook, which is a simple interaction that users will believably engage in. So sometimes I see entrepreneurs who've got this great idea for a market. They have pointed out some market that's inefficient, but they haven't been able to productize that insight into something that I believe people will actually use. The product is too complicated. It doesn't immediately engage people. And really what you're looking for here is a simple behavior that users will repeatedly engage in. So it could be the tweet, right? It's a simple status update or it's, you know, you push a button and a town car shows up. And that sort of uberfication now, which is the sort of creating push button interfaces that do one thing, I think it's even more sort of important design principle. Now, in the age of mobile, the problem with designing a site that doesn't have a hook is that it's very hard to get users to engage in more complicated behaviors if you can't get them to engage in a simple behavior. And so complexifying your product and adding a whole lot of bells and whistles won't necessarily improve it if there's not like a core behavior that users are willing to engage in. Now sometimes you'll get products that the hook is just explosive. And even to the point where the entrepreneurs didn't even know what their market need was, they just built this product. Twitter was kind of like that, where it just took off. I'm not sure that the creators knew exactly they'd be disrupting the news industry or sort of taking that over, but they felt like people would use the product. And I think that's also a very sound way to go that you can sort of, you know, given a choice between a founder who's discovered a market need versus one that has a great product hook, I would rather take the product hook. Even if it means that they still have to figure out what market they're actually disrupting. And this is why, you know, entrepreneurial types tend not to be the super analytical sort of. It's not like it's not necessarily the McKinsey consultants or the Harvard MBAs who figure out these new markets. It's the more eclectic, idiosyncratic entrepreneurs who figure this stuff out because they're able to actually build a product that has a hook and gets traction, which I think is very frustrating to kind of the people who would like this process to be more tracked and sort of analytical, but I think it's worth keeping that in mind.
