How to Hook Users in 3 Steps

Hi, my name is Nir Eyal and in this episode we are going to learn how to hook your users in three steps. I'm going to teach you all about habit testing. So for the past 25 years, something that all great tech companies have had in common is that they are experts at building user habits. Products like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, all of these products have become indispensable. They become part of our daily routines. The problem is, of course, that creating habits is easier said than done. And there aren't that many resources for entrepreneurs out there trying to figure out how to build a consumer habit. Of course, there is one good book you can read on that topic. So today I'm gonna share with you one particular technique that I call habit testing that's incredibly effective at figuring out what habits you should build for how you should design your product to cater to existing consumer habits and to build and refine your product to sustain those user behaviors. Now, if you're familiar with the work of Eric Reiss, maybe you've read Lean Startup, he just came out with a new book called the Leader's Guide to Implementing the Lean Startup. You'll be familiar with the lean methodology of building, measuring and learning. And the technique I'm about to share with you, habit testing, fits hand in glove with that methodology. Now, the purpose of habit testing is to figure out how to. Three things. Number one, who are your devotees? Who are the people who already are habituated to using your product? Number two, what is it about your product that's already habit forming? And number three, what's the common path that these users took to form their habit in the first place? So I should mention that habit testing is something that you do after you've built your mvp, after you have a minimum viable product out there that's already up and running. If you haven't built that product yet, the first, the first thing you should do is figure out the hook model which I describe in the book and in earlier videos to first formulate what your product is all about. So now that your site or app is up and running and you want to figure out how to make it more habit forming, it's absolutely critical that you collect the right type of data. So for habit testing to be useful, what you have to be able to do is collect date stamped information about how users used your product. So with that data in hand, the first step of habit testing is called the the identify step. The identify step is all about understanding who are the users that are currently habituated to your product or service. Now, that requires that you set some kind of number, some reasonable expectation. Ask yourself, if someone was habitually using my product or service, how often would they use it? Some products need to be used every day, some once a week. How often would a habituated user use your product or service? Just make sure to be very realistic about how frequently you would expect something, someone to use your service. You know, something like Snapchat has to be used every day for it to be useful. But maybe a product like Flixter, a movie recommendation site, once a week, would probably be the right number for a habituated user. One shortcut, of course, is to see how often you use the product or service. If you're building your app or website, you yourself should be using it. And so a good question to ask is, you know, how often do you find it useful? Now, that number really should be within a week's time or less. You know, as we discussed in previous videos, frequency is a key point prerequisite for habit formation. So that key behavior checking in opening the app, scrolling a feed, that has to occur within a week's time or less, or your product probably isn't a good candidate to build a habit around in the first place. So there's kind of a test and exit criteria before you move on to the next step of habit testing, which is I believe at least 5% of your users should already be habituated. If 5% of your users are not already habituated, probably means you need to go back to the drawing board, you need to take out the hook model, the trigger, the action, the reward, and the investment, and figure out what's missing, what, what is not working in your hook model and go back to the drawing board to figure out how to bump up those numbers to at least 5%. So now that you've come up with the number of times a user should use your service and you've identified those users, now it's time to get to the second step of habit testing, which is the codify step. So the codify phase is all about figuring out what is your user's habit path. The habit path is the steps that your users took before they became habituated. So what you want to do is look for those 5% of users who are already habituated to your product and service and understand what did they do, what's unique about them, what steps did they take, what was the aha moment before they became habituated? For example, Twitter figured out that the more people followed others, the more likely they were to become habituated. Users. So you want to figure out what's unique about your habituated users, that 5% or more of users who are already habituated, what did they do differently, what steps did they take? And you want to know that information so that you could codify it into your product and move on to the next step of habit testing, which, which is to modify your product. So to review. Habit testing has these three basic steps. First step is to identify your habituated users. Step two is to codify what those users did, the habit path that habituated them. And then finally, step number three is to modify your product. Identify, codify and modify. And of course, the modify phase is all about taking that information, understanding what your users did to become habituated in the first place, and, and then modifying your product so that all new users take the same habit path. So back to that Twitter example. In their early days, when they figured out the habit path that users took was following other users, they modified the product, the onboarding experience, so that of course today the first thing you do when you sign up for Twitter is that you're prompted to follow other people so you can continue to use this process and track users by cohort to see what changes in your product, how you can modify your hook model to, to increase user retention per cohort. Cohort analysis is absolutely critical if you're trying to boost user engagement. If you're not familiar with the term, just Google it. There's lots of resources out there about how to do cohort analysis. By doing habit testing, you're more likely to figure out that nugget of wisdom, that bit of information that will tell you how to change your product in the future to make habituation to your product more likely. So remember, the three steps of habit testing are to identify, codify and modify. Now go out there and build a habit forming product to help people build healthy habits to improve their lives and I'll see you next time.