What's up everyone, this is Cortland Allen from ndhackers.com, where I talk to the founders
of profitable internet businesses.
Today I'm talking to Nir Ayal, a serial entrepreneur and author who is perhaps best known for his
book.
It's called Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products.
I've read the book a couple of times now and I thought it was great.
And if you haven't read it yet, I'm betting that by the end of this episode, you'll want
to go out and grab a copy.
As the title implies, it's all about how to build habit-forming products that keep
users coming back on a regular basis.
And who among us doesn't want to know how to do that?
Nir is an expert in this area, obviously, and I had more than a few questions after
reading his book.
So it was very illuminating to be able to sit down with him and ask him questions about
how entrepreneurs can best take advantage of what we know about habit formation.
And he breaks down the exact processes behind how companies like Facebook are able to keep
users hooked on their products, and also the science underlying it, which I personally
find very interesting.
We also get into a discussion about the ethical issues surrounding the entire topic.
As you can imagine, the things that we know about the brain today and about habit formation
can be used for both good and bad, and there's a lot of important discussion to be had about
the gray area between the two, so I really wanted to pick Nir's brain on this subject.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun recording this episode.
Nir is a super smart guy with a lot of insightful and practical knowledge for entrepreneurs to
use, and I hope you guys enjoy hearing what he has to say as much as I did.
I'm here with Nir Eyal.
Nir, welcome to the podcast, and thanks for coming on.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
No problem.
I'm excited to have you on.
You're the author of Hooked How to Build Habit Forming Products, and you've also got a blog
at nirandfar.com where you write about habits and what you call behavioral design, the intersection
of psychology, technology, and business.
I think this combination of factors is just about as important as any other field of study
today, especially if you judge based on where we spend our time making habitual use of products
like Facebook and Twitter and all sorts of other things and staring at our phone.
It's certainly relevant to the audience listening in right now, who are mostly aspiring entrepreneurs
with dreams of building products that people love and make habitual use of.
Rather than diving directly into your book, I'd love to have you describe your background
and how exactly you developed this particular area of expertise.
Sure.
My background is that I started a couple of tech companies and exited both.
The last company was at the intersection of gaming and advertising.
I had this really interesting vantage point to see a lot of companies come and go in these
two industries of advertising and gaming.
These are, frankly, two industries that are dependent upon mind control.
They are dependent upon influencing people's behavior.
Advertising is all about influencing human behavior and game design.
There's probably no industry that understands how to get people to do things better than
the gaming industry.
At the vantage point between these two industries, I learned a lot of these patterns, if you
will, of how to influence behavior through digital interfaces.
When my last company was acquired and I had some time on my hands, I really wanted to
focus on what is it about these products that brings people back?
How do products and services influence our behavior?
When I went out there to try and find those lessons, I didn't find any book.
I didn't find any guide for how to do it.
I decided to write my own so that I could, frankly, answer these questions for myself,
but also so that I could provide a guidebook for all sorts of companies out there that
are trying to change human behavior for good.
I think that there's a real deficit out there of people building products and services in
ways that effectively change human behavior.
There's a lot of people trying to, right?
They're building products and services that could improve people's lives if they were
designed properly.
I think that's a real disaster that we don't have enough people who understand these techniques.
It's not just social networks.
It's not just gaming companies, but it's all sorts of companies that are using these techniques
for good.
You mentioned wanting to provide a guidebook to help other people change human behavior
for good, but the research that you started doing and the writings came in the form of
your blog.
How did you decide to turn your blog and your writings into an actual book, and what was
that process like?
Yeah, so I never set out to write a book.
I was just writing a bunch of blog posts about what I was learning, and what I was learning
was based on what I wanted to know, frankly, and so I just kept writing these blog posts
trying to answer my own questions.
I spent a lot of time in the Stanford library.
I spent a lot of time talking to practitioners in Silicon Valley who were building these
products and services that really amazed me, like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and
WhatsApp and Slack.
These companies do such an amazing job of bringing us back that I really wanted to discover
their secrets on a psychological basis.
I started just sharing what I was learning through these blog posts, and then I started
getting requests from folks like, hey, I want to share this with my team.
Do you have a PDF you can share with me about the stuff that you've learned?
How do I share what you're writing about in a way that people can understand?
So I kind of got requested from my blog readers to write the book, so after about two years
of blogging, I decided to put together the book into what I thought would be a little
PDF that ended up becoming like over 200 pages.
Yeah, I've heard of a lot of startups that start that way where someone's doing something
maybe as a hobby or just as something that they enjoy doing, and people say, hey, I would
love to pay for something like this, but I've never heard of a book starting that way.
Yeah, yeah, it was great, actually.
I self-published the book at first, thinking, okay, maybe a few people would want to see
it, and then the book kind of took a little life of its own when it started getting a
bunch of reviews on Amazon, a bunch of five-star reviews.
It wasn't until that started happening that I actually got a call from a publisher and
from book agents asking to publish it for real.
That's awesome, and that must have felt great to have a publisher reach out to you.
Between this phase of people on your blog knowing about your book and you getting all
these five-star reviews on Amazon, what kinds of things did you do to market your book?
Not much.
Not much.
I was giving talks.
I lived in San Francisco, and I was getting out there into the product design and tech
community and giving talks about the subject matter of the book, but not too much more
than that.
Yeah, it's interesting because I want to get into the discussion of the book itself.
But in a way, writing a book and getting the word out about it, especially if you self-publish,
I'm sure, are full of the same lessons and challenges as starting a company and getting
the word out about a product that you build.
Yeah, there are a lot of parallels.
I think one of the things that I did that helped a lot was that I involved my blog readers.
One thing that I did was I invited all my blog readers to read a very early version
of the book and then leave comments about what they thought of the book in a Google
doc.
900 people actually signed up to be contributors, and they helped me edit the book.
So this did a few things.
So the deal was if you helped me edit my book, then I would list your name in the back of
the book.
Until this very day, there are about three pages of names at the very, very back of the
book of everybody who helped me.
This was tremendous in that, number one, the book got way, way better.
As an author or as the parallel here is to a startup entrepreneur, if one customer complains
or in my case, one reader complains and says, hey, what you wrote here doesn't make sense,
well then that's your opinion versus my opinion.
But when 25 people say, this is stupid, this doesn't make sense or your product sucks,
then you can actually start to do something about it and change your product.
So that's what I did.
The book got so much better because I involved people and asked them to help me.
But then the other un-predicted benefit was that these people were my most devoted fans.
So when the book actually came out and then I told them, these 900 people, hey, the book
that you helped edit is now being published, I'd love it if you got a copy, but can you
help spread the word?
Well, of course, those were my most helpful fans who really helped me get the word out
about the book.
It was great.
Yeah, I think that's a lot of author's dream actually to have 900 people give them feedback
about what they've written so they can make it more engaging, more educational, more clear
before releasing it to the wider world.
And it just goes to show the benefit of actually building up an audience because you've been
blogging for how long at that point?
About two years.
But the interesting thing is that when you write a book, you typically can't do what
I did because the way traditional book writing works, the process works, kind of works the
way we used to build software where you sell a book proposal and then you essentially are
locked in to this deal with the book publisher because you get an advance and then you go
write the book and you're not allowed to share it with anybody, particularly, I mean, a publisher
was still to this day, if you told them, hey, I want to share this book with 900 people
for free before I publish it, they'll say that's a terrible idea, right, because they
own the right, they own the copyright and they don't want to do that, right?
They want those people to buy the books and they don't want it pirated.
But I didn't have that constraint because I self-published it first.
So this is very analogous to how to build software, you know, waterfall processes versus
lean startup processes that we do today is all about getting customer feedback, hearing
from what people like and don't like about your product so you can iterate on it before
you get it out there in its alpha form.
I can probably talk for like an hour just about self-publishing and how that industry
is changing and where it will be in the future, but let's dive into the actual content of
your book because it's pretty remarkable that you built a blog and you started writing about
something that just interested you and, you know, you get to the point where you have
a thousand people who want your book so badly that they'll actually volunteer to, you know,
help you edit it.
And in the book you talk about the Hooked Cycle.
I'm sure a lot of people who are listening in have read the book, but let's go through
it kind of step by step.
What is the Hooked Cycle?
Sure.
So I'll give you kind of a 30,000-foot view of this basic four-step process that we see
is embedded in all sorts of habit-forming products.
So of course, when you think about the apps on your phone and the phone itself, you know,
apps like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat, all of
these things have what I call a hook built into the core experience.
And these hooks have four parts, four phases.
Every hook starts with a trigger, which is a call to action.
It tells you what to do next.
And those calls to action can either be externally triggered or internally triggered.
We'll get back to the internal triggers in a second, but let's talk about the external
triggers.
External triggers are things that give you some piece of information for what to do next.
So let's take everybody's favorite habit-forming product, Facebook.
When you get a notification or an email or something, you know, some kind of ping or
ding that tells you what to do next, you open the app.
That takes you to the next step of the hook.
The action phase of the hook is defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation
of reward.
So just that simple act of opening the app and scrolling the feed, that's the core habit
that Facebook wants to habituate its users to.
And what we find is in the history of technology, technology is fundamentally all about decreasing
the friction, decreasing the work it takes to get our reward.
So as business people, as people who are designing these products, I can't underemphasize how
important it is to make your product as easy as possible to use.
If you want to habituate people to doing a behavior regularly, you've got to make that
behavior as easy as possible because the more people are more likely to do a behavior, the
easier it is to do.
And so there's a whole chapter on the trigger phase, on the action phase.
The next thing that happens, just to follow this example of using Facebook, you open the
app, you scroll the feed.
The next step of the hook is the reward phase.
And it's not just a reward.
It's not just about scratching the itch.
It's also about having an element of variability at the core of these most habit-forming products
that we see today in our digital devices is some kind of variable reward.
This comes out of the work of B.F.
Skinner, a psychologist back from the 1950s and 60s, who found that when he gave his pigeons
a little food pellet, when he gave them that food pellet on a predictable schedule, meaning
they would push the lever and get a reward, push the lever, get a reward, they only would
push on the lever whenever they were hungry.
But then when he introduced some variability, meaning the pigeon would push on the little
lever, and sometimes they would get a food pellet, and sometimes they wouldn't, that's
when Skinner observed the rate of response, the number of times that these pigeons pecked
at the disc and turned on this lever, occurred much more frequently.
So when you think about what makes gambling something that people habituate to, what makes
television shows fun to watch, why we like scrolling our Facebook news feeds, why we
like watching sports, why we fall in love and romance, I mean, all of these things have
this basic element of variability.
And so the most habit-forming technologies also incorporate that, this core element of
a variable reward, scratching the user's itch and yet leaving them wanting more for the
next pass through the hook cycle.
And then finally, the last step of the hook is the investment phase.
The investment phase is really something that is quintessential for product, as opposed
to offline habits.
Online habits are so powerful because these products for the first time are shaping themselves
based on the input you give them, and that's brand new.
That's really, really important.
You know, if you think about the history of manufacturing, the history of business, it
took a long time for a product to change, right?
You know, Henry Ford famously said that the customer could have any model of his car as
long as it was black, because it took a lot of time and money to change and customize
a product.
Well, today, that's not the case anymore.
Today, Facebook, if I gave you my Facebook login information, or I have Pinterest account
information, or you name it, my Slack account information, it would kind of be useless to
you.
It actually wouldn't be that useful unless you were trying to hack me.
It actually wouldn't be all that helpful to you because it's been customized based on
my information, my data.
And that's what makes this current generation of technology so powerful, and why it's revolutionizing
business.
This investment phase asks the user to essentially co-create the product with the company.
So every time you like something on Facebook, you comment, you add a friend, any of these
behaviors and giving them data about you, you are essentially improving the product
with use.
And that's a really, really big deal, that the product gets better and better the more
you use it.
But that investment not only makes the product better, it makes you more likely to come back
and use the product in the future because you have committed to it.
You have put effort into it, which is another known psychological phenomenon.
It's called the IKEA effect.
We know that the more you put effort into something, the more you like it, the more
you appreciate it.
So that's what makes the investment phase so important.
It improves the product with use, it increases user satisfaction with the product, and it
also loads the next trigger.
So finishing up this Facebook example, when you do any of those investments that I just
discussed, you're giving the company an excuse, a reason, a rationale to reach out to you
again and send you a notification that says, hey, guess what?
Somebody liked your photo or somebody commented on the string that you've commented on, that
you were mentioned in.
And so they're reaching back out to you with another external trigger, prompting you through
the hook model once again.
Now the really interesting part is that through successive cycles, through this hook, eventually
you no longer need those external triggers at all.
And now you become prompted through what's called an internal trigger.
An internal trigger is where the information for what to do next is in your head, is a
memory, is an association.
And it's typically triggered through emotion.
Yeah, I was going to, if you don't mind me interrupting for a second, because I was just
about to ask you in your book, you give an example where users quote, feel a pang of
loneliness and before rational thought occurs, you're scrolling through your Facebook feed.
And that's something that I've experienced before, you know, just the feeling of sitting
at my computer, working and being productive, and I sort of blackout for a split second,
wake up and somehow I'm on Facebook or Hacker News without even remembering how I got there.
So that's when they've won.
That's the essential leap that a habit forming product has to make.
They have to cross this gap of becoming purely externally triggered, meaning it's always
a ping or a notification or a commercial or something that tells you what to do, which
generally costs money.
If you think about, you know, ad industry, they charge big bucks to get in front of enough
eyeballs where as you transition to a product where people are triggering themselves.
I mean, this is why you don't see Facebook running a bunch of Super Bowl commercials
or spending money on a bunch of television ads and print ads, radio ads.
They don't need it because you're not triggered through an external trigger with Facebook.
It's the product itself.
It's this internal trigger that gets you to come back because you've associated with
loneliness in the case of Facebook or boredom in the case of YouTube or Reddit or whatever
that negative emotional state that you feel the relief is found with one of these apps.
Yeah, that's the Holy Grail.
I mean, that's where all of us want our apps to be.
And overall, I mean, that's a lot of information to process what you just went through.
But at the same time, it's so simple.
It's just four steps.
And the research behind it is also fascinating because it spans such a large time scale.
B.F.
Skinner was doing his behavioral research on pigeons 70 something odd years ago, whereas
the IKEA research that you mentioned took place fairly recently.
So we've got basically a centuries worth of knowledge being condensed into a limited set
of steps that companies are taking advantage of today.
Yeah, I mean, I wanted to make it simple so that it's accessible.
So that I wrote this book, you know, there's a lot of books out there about psychology
that are really interesting to discuss at a dinner party.
But when it comes to brass tacks of, all right, what do I do with this?
How do I build a better product, they kind of leave you hanging.
So I didn't want a lot of fluffy stories.
I wanted to tell entrepreneurs and product designers, here's what you do.
Here's how to use this stuff.
Yeah, and one of the points you make in the book is that a lot of companies are super
advanced in how much they know about this stuff, but it's kind of a trade secret, right?
They don't have exactly a huge incentive to tell everybody else in the world, here's how
you build an addictive product.
So I'm curious, how did you piece together so much of this information, when such a large
percentage of it is probably locked away behind closed doors?
Right.
So one thing I just want to correct, if you don't mind, is I don't like the word addiction.
Totally.
And there's a very specific reason I did not call the book how to build addictive products.
I call the book how to build habit forming products, because addictions are always bad.
We never want to addict people addiction is defined as a persistent compulsive dependency
on a behavior or substance that harms the user.
So I'm anti addiction.
I think if companies addict people knowingly, they have an ethical responsibility to help
those people disconnect.
Now, habits is a whole nother story, because we have good habits, and habits can help people
live much better lives.
So everything in the book is really about how to build habits to help people do things
they want to do, but for lack of good product design, don't do.
So I just wanted to make sure we differentiate between addiction and habits.
Yeah, I think it's a worthwhile distinction to make, and I would love to, I think, hopefully
toward the end of this episode, we'll have a lot more time to talk about the moral issues
at play, because I think it's, it's, it's, there's potentially a large gray area between
where a habit ends, and an addiction begins.
Or you can imagine using something like Twitter productively, and then using it in a distracted
or addicted manner at different times in the same day, where it's hard to make a single
summary judgment.
Yeah.
So, so, but frankly, you know, I learned a lot of these techniques from businesses that
are dependent on addiction.
You know, there are several industries that I won't work for, I do, I do a lot of consulting
on my book, for products that are, you know, want to increase engagement and user retention.
And there's some industries I just won't talk to, and I won't work with, because they depend
upon not habituated users, they depend upon addicted users.
So when a casino calls me, I won't work with them.
When a, when a, when a gaming company, you know, not all gaming companies, when I think
about online gaming companies, you know, we think about Clash of Clans or Candy Crush
or, you know, Farmville back in the day, many of these companies, again, not all of them,
many of these companies depend upon what we call whales.
These 1% of users that make up 99% of the inner of the revenue of these companies.
So it's not about, you know, somebody going to Las Vegas on a bachelor or bachelorette
party, you know, every couple years, Vegas doesn't really care about those people.
Vegas depends upon the people who sit in front of those slot machines, sometimes wearing
diapers, so they don't have to get up from their chairs.
That's who Vegas depends upon.
And so that's why I won't work with those type of companies, because it's really about
addicts.
So the way I learned the techniques I put in the book are frankly from watching and
learning from these industries that at the time use these tactics to addict people.
And the point here, why did I study those industries?
The point here is that I want it twofold.
One, I want to use these same techniques so that it's not just the gaming companies and
the gambling industry and the social networks.
They don't need to read my book, they already know this stuff.
I want to take the same techniques and bring them to apps that help people save money,
that help people exercise more, that help them connect with friends and family, that
help them become more productive at work.
Those same tactics, you're a dummy if you don't use those tactics in these businesses
that really truly can help people improve their lives.
So that's the number one reason I wrote the book.
The second reason I wrote the book is that I wanted all of us to understand that, look,
these products and services, you can't help but read this book and not realize, wait a
minute, this is being done to me.
I need to be more aware about why is it that I keep using Facebook even when I don't want
to?
Why do I keep watching Netflix and YouTube even when I don't want to in that minute when
I know I should be doing something else?
So it's important to realize that these products, they didn't get lucky.
They didn't design these products and just stumbled into them.
They are engaging by design.
If you think about the background of Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hoffman, the founders of
Instagram, all of these people, all of them, have psych backgrounds.
Mark Zuckerberg's major at Harvard before he dropped out was computer science and psychology.
Kevin Systrom at Stanford, one of the founders of Instagram, was a symbolic systems major,
which is a combination of CS and psych.
They understand what makes you click and what makes you tick better than you understand
yourself.
And so the way that we put technology in its place is by understanding how these hooks
work so that we can build healthy habits when they serve us.
And also, I'm just as much of an advocate for breaking unhealthy habits where they don't
give us what we want.
Yeah.
I think there's a case to be made that you could kind of characterize this entire process
as an arms race of sorts where companies are creating better and better hooks, but users
are getting better also at recognizing what's going on and therefore resisting what's going
on, even if they're doing so subconsciously.
And I think you could see that trend, for example, in the advertising industry where
if you look back at the ads from the early 20th century, they're almost comical.
I mean, the lack of subtlety is stunning.
And those ads would probably never work on people today, but they worked on people back
then because they didn't have their defenses up.
Do you think that companies nowadays will have to continue iterating and improving upon
their habit-forming techniques in order for them to keep working?
Or are we at a point where the methods are so effective and they penetrate to such a
deep level in the brain that's so base and automatic that they're difficult or even impossible
to resist despite knowing how they work?
I think that we have this perception that these products are hard to resist today because
they're so new.
But I promise you, in a few years' time, we'll look back and laugh just the way we laugh
at old ads for cigarettes, et cetera.
What happens with technology, what happens with persuasion techniques is invariably that
when people learn about how these techniques work, they do become less effective to some
degree.
And I think that's a very good thing, right?
So I think we need this phase of assessing, wait a minute, is this really helping me or
is this hurting me?
I mean, I'm very much an advocate for us taking a step back from our technologies and asking
ourselves this fundamental question of, am I serving the technology or is the technology
serving me?
And I think we should do that for all sorts of habits that we have, not just when it comes
to our personal technology.
I mean, look, the average American spends five hours a day watching television.
What the fuck?
I mean, that's ridiculous, right?
And I think we should be just as much up in arms over how much time and human potential
that wastes.
Nobody talks about it.
Nobody's up in arms about Facebook or games, but there's lots of ways that people waste
their time that I think people should stop and ask themselves, sports, for example, oh
my God, how much time are we going to spend watching a ball or a puck bounce across a
field?
I mean, come on, there's other ways to spend our time.
So if you take a look at time wasters and want to take a moral stance on them, there's
lots of time wasters out there.
On the other hand, we can ask ourselves, wait a minute, you know what?
Entertainment is something that people want, right?
That boredom is a fundamental human problem that we need a solution to.
Boredom sucks.
Boredom is literally painful to the human brain in many ways, as much as painful as
physical pain.
And so people look for relief.
People look for solutions.
And so whether it's religion, whether it's love, whether it's drugs, whether it's alcohol,
whether it's games, whether it's sports or television or movies or books, I mean, the
amount of distraction from day to day life that people need to quell this pain of boredom
of just sitting still is a huge industry.
Multiple billion dollar industries are based on relieving that boredom.
I think when you're talking about entertainment and you're talking about boredom and you
look at applications that are social, like Facebook and Twitter, you look at games like
Farm Bill and Candy Crush, it's easy to see how creating habits is not only useful for
those companies, but it's pretty much necessary and it's evidently doable because they're
creating products that are inherently fun and that cure your boredom and that have obvious
rewards.
But let's say you're a founder and you're working on a more typical company, like developer
tools, for example, or let's say you're building a productivity application, but I think it's
less obvious how habits play into people using your product as opposed to them using it because
it solves a particular problem or because their coworkers are urging them to use it.
Do you think the hooked model is just as applicable with these types of companies?
So the real differentiation, the line of demarcation is not enterprise versus consumer.
It's frequent versus infrequent.
If you have the kind of product that somebody buys and then doesn't use, you don't need
a habit, right?
Because a habit depends upon sufficient frequency.
The behavior has to occur within about a week's time or less.
The more often it occurs, the more likely it is to become a habit.
Also, the more you need it to become a habit, right?
Facebook doesn't really work if you use it once a year.
You have to use it often or it's kind of useless.
So when it comes to enterprise software, if you're selling the kind of product that is
only used once something terrible happens on some server farm somewhere, then you don't
need a habit.
You just sell the product in and it just works in the background until it needs some kind
of externally triggered involvement.
Now, lots of products today, even in the enterprise, especially in the enterprise, are no longer
being sold from the top down.
They're being sold from the bottom up.
So when you think about products like GitHub or Salesforce or Stack Overflow, I mean, there's
the list goes on and on of different products in the enterprise today that are used first
by frontline employees.
Then once they've adopted them, then one day the manager wakes up and says, hey, who do
I pay?
This is so valuable.
Where do I send the check?
I mean, Slack is a perfect example of that, the fastest growing enterprise product in
history.
It's no longer good enough to have a product that does the right things.
It has to actually engage people.
It has to keep people coming back.
It has to form a habit.
Even in the enterprise or for a SaaS company, you're never going to get re-upped.
You're not going to keep re-subscribing and keep paying that monthly bill if nobody is
using the product.
So I think habits are just as important when it comes to the enterprise if the product
is used frequently enough to require a habit.
The point about frequency that you made is a very good one, but I think what I'm getting
at here is whether or not there are other factors that cause people to return to apps
frequently, but not habitually.
One example I could pull from my own personal life is Asana.
I use Asana for task management.
I only have a limited window into my subconscious, so I could be totally off base here.
But I don't feel hooked on Asana, nor do I feel like it's a habit.
I don't ever find myself opening it the same way I might reflexively open Facebook, where
I just go there for seemingly no reason just because I'm hooked on it.
However, I do use Asana on a regular basis multiple times per day because that's where
all of my tasks are, and I need them to get work done.
So it solves a real problem for me.
Am I not coming back to this app because of the problem that it solves?
Or would you say that I'm coming back because it's successfully forming a habit?
And if so, how would you fit an app like Asana into the Hooked model?
Yeah, I think Asana's a great example of a product that you use habitually, and I think
part of the test for is it used habitually, is what happened if Asana sent you an email
tomorrow and said, hey, we're shutting down, sorry, that would be a big deal, that would
be a big problem for you, right?
Because you've formed these habits and routines, a lot of it based on the investment you've
made, right?
The fact that they've collected your data about all your tasks and the various states
of completion, that's really important stuff.
And so I think the Hook, we can walk through it actually for a product like Asana.
I think the internal trigger is uncertainty about what to do, right?
So you sit down at your desk every day, and you're asking yourself, what's most important?
What's top priority?
That's one internal trigger.
There are probably others you could think of.
That's a big one.
You sit down at your desk.
Yeah, that's the big one, right?
So the clock's ticking on your day, you need to be productive.
And so you ask yourself, what do I do next?
And this happens subconsciously, by the way.
I don't think people sit there twiddling their thumbs and say, ooh, what do I do next?
This happens in the blink of an eye.
You push that little icon wherever it might be.
You open up the site, that's the action phase, right?
It's just opening the page.
The variable reward is what's next?
What do I need to do?
Of course, one of the things that makes a product like Asana so powerful is that it involves
other people.
So the variable reward is what I call rewards of the tribe, right?
Knowing that somebody finished a task and now you need to do something, they're waiting
for you.
There's this variability around, is the task complete?
How well was it completed?
What do I have to do next?
What message do I need to send to somebody to keep moving the ball forward?
All of these things are variable.
There's uncertainty there about what happens next.
And then, of course, the investment is pretty obvious.
Every time I add information, I add data, I add tasks, I assign tasks, I invite people.
All of those are investments that make the product better and better and better with
use.
When you talk about step three of the hooked model and you're talking about variable rewards,
what's one way that entrepreneurs can identify the parts of their apps that count as rewards
as far as the hooked model is concerned?
If you're building something like a game or Facebook, then it's obvious.
The reward is when you kill the bad guy or when you log in and you see photos of your
friend or you see that you've got new likes.
Those are obviously rewarding experiences, so the only task left is to figure out how
to vary them.
But if you're building something like a sauna, it's less obvious what the rewards are.
What counts and what doesn't?
You know, for the sake of time, severely constricting the book, but there's a lot more in the book
about how to do exactly that.
In the chapter on rewards, I talk about these three different type of variable rewards.
There's rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self.
These three different types of rewards, the rewards of the tribe are pretty obvious.
These are rewards that come from other people, things that feel good that come from other
people.
Then there's rewards of the hunt, which is all about the search for information, for
material goods, for physical possession, so hunting for a deal, looking for news, snippets.
All of these things are rewards of the hunt.
Then you have rewards of the self, which is all about the search for mastery, completion,
competency, control.
I go into a lot of depth around these three types of variable rewards.
All habit-forming products have at least one of these three rewards.
Some, the really good ones, have all three, so when you think about email, email uses
rewards of the tribe, hunt, and self, which is one of the reasons it's such a persistent
technology that nobody terribly loves all that much, but is so habit-forming that it's
hard to stop using.
Yeah, email is one of those things that I dread, but like you said, you just can't stop
using it.
There's four steps here.
You have to get people through all four of these steps in order to complete a loop through
the cycle.
You can't just be missing an entire step, but which of these steps would you say is
the least important?
If you're a founder working on a company and you have to slack off a bit on one part of
the cycle, what would it be?
That's really contextually specific.
It's based on your product or service.
When I meet with companies or when I talk to founders, sometimes they're deficient with
their trigger.
Sometimes if the action is too difficult, other times the reward isn't rewarding or
it doesn't leave the user wanting more.
Sometimes they're not asking for a proper investment or they're not using it correctly.
There's no one phase of the hook where a company is deficient, but what I will tell you is
that if your product does not habit-forming and it's used with sufficient frequency, it
should be used with sufficient frequency, and it's not, that's where the hook is a diagnostic
tool.
The hook is really useful either very early days, before you have a product, you just
have a paper sketch, and you're trying to figure out, all right, before I invest my
life and my time and my money into this new company, how do I make sure that it has the
four basic elements of the hook to make sure it becomes a habit?
The other place where it's very useful is after the product is built, damn it, it's
not habit-forming and we don't know why.
Then it becomes a diagnostic tool where you can run through the four steps of the hook
to figure out which of your four steps is missing, and then of course that's where you
focus your time and effort.
I've got a question from a user on the IndieHackers Forum who wants to know, what is a low-hanging
fruit here?
You work with a lot of companies on helping them build more habit-forming products.
Are there any common mistakes you see being made broadly across industry lines, and what
advice do you have for avoiding these mistakes?
Well, the biggest thing I want founders to hear is that they don't use this.
A lot of times we think about the questions I get asked or a lot of times about what you
were asking about earlier, like, oh, why is this dangerous?
Technology seems to be addicting everybody.
I agree there are downsides that we need to talk about, but that's not the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that we're not hooking people enough.
We are wasting so much time in human capital making software not suck.
For this interview, we were just talking about how shitty the software is to get this call
going.
How much technology out there, when you think about government services, when you think
about engaging with local businesses, when you think about all these things that could
make our life easier and better, these technologies, they don't suck us in, not the way Facebook
and Twitter does.
No, no, they just suck.
That's really where I want to focus my time and effort.
That's why I'm so passionate about what I do, is because the first thing founders need
to do is to wake up and realize having a good product is not enough.
Everybody thinks that if their product is good, then that's going to be it.
It's not the best product that wins.
There's no 11th commandment that says that the best product wins.
It's not the best product that wins.
If the product that captures the monopoly of the mind, the first-to-mind solution, that's
the product that captures the market.
The first thing to do is to realize that you have to understand consumer psychology if
you're going to build an engaging product.
More specifically, if you're asking which of the four phases do companies typically
neglect, it's probably the investment phase.
The metaphor I like to use here is, imagine you get a call from a good friend of yours
and they say, hey, Cortland, I haven't seen you in a really long time.
I'd love to sit down together.
Let's grab lunch or some coffee together.
You say, great, let's do it.
You sit down together and you have a really great conversation.
They tell you what's going on in their life.
You become a little vulnerable and you tell them about what you're struggling with.
You tell them about your work life, your love life.
You spill your guts and tell them all this information about you, about what's going
on in your life.
Then, you part ways, it was a beautiful lunch and then a few weeks later, they call you
up again and say, hey, let's get together again.
You sit down with them and you start seeing how they're doing and then you very quickly
realize they don't remember anything you told them.
They don't remember a single detail about your kid's names, about where you work.
They don't remember any of it.
Very quickly, that person would not be your friend.
This person is either a jerk or has amnesia.
You think to yourself, well, we wouldn't do that.
The apps that we're building, the products and services that we're making, we wouldn't
do that, would we?
Well, we do this to people all the time.
We ask them for information and then we don't do anything with it.
We don't make the product better based on the information they're giving us.
I think that is a huge mistake, that products and services that are attempting to become
part of our daily routine, whose business models depend upon becoming habits, have to
ask people for investment and do something with it, have to make the product better and
better with use.
I think a friendship would get better the more you know about the other person.
Yeah, I think that for most founders, the idea of kind of slotting the app that they're
working on into the same slot they might put a friendship or a friend in is completely
unnatural.
It's not something that you think that my user has a personal relationship with my product
and that therefore, if it doesn't act in the same ways that another person does, they won't
find it as engaging or as friendly or as easy to use.
Also to your point about the investment being so difficult to one of the most often neglected
parts of the hook cycle and a way it almost seems contradictory to what's going on and
another part of the hook cycle, which is the action.
The action is all about allowing the user to come into your app with as little friction
as possible.
Your goal is to remove as many obstacles as possible and ask the user to do as little
as possible so they're more likely to get into your app without dropping off and start
developing a habit.
But then by asking users to invest in your app, you're doing the exact opposite.
You're saying, hey, upload your photos and fill out a profile and follow people and create
tasks or whatever it is that your app does.
But of course, all these actions involve a lot of work.
What's the best way to strike the right balance here and how do you know where to take away
friction and where to ask for investment?
Right, right.
So it's really about the timing, right?
So a lot of companies I see do very much what you've described.
Before you can use the product, we'd like you to tell us your name, your email, your
social security number, your mother's maiden name, your place of birth, your favorite color,
your favorite food, like this huge onboarding process when I haven't even gotten any benefit.
And that's a big mistake.
And so I think with every interaction that we use a product, we have to first scratch
the user's itch.
We have to very quickly give them that variable reward.
But then after the variable reward, that's when we ask for the bit of information.
That's where we put in a bit of friction to make the product better and better with use.
Because at that point, it's natural, right?
If I've gotten something out of the product, sure, I'm going to like something or comment
on something or add something or contribute something.
Again, it has to be very simple, right?
We still have to follow the rules of good product design to make it as easy as possible.
And if it's not easy, we'll get less of that behavior.
But it's really about the fundamental timing of when in the user flow do we ask for that
investment.
On the subject of timing, you wrote Hook back in 2012 or at the very least you started blogging
and writing about it back then.
And that was only five years ago, but as we all know, things move fast in tech.
So just for reference, that was the same year that Lyft was created.
So it's safe to say that things have changed since then.
If you could rewrite Hook today, is there anything that you would change about the book?
Or have things largely remained the same?
Well, the book is actually published in 2014, but you're right, I started writing it back
in, or writing the blog back in 2012.
There are a lot of things that I didn't realize or didn't put in the book, but I think the
fundamental tenants haven't changed.
So many of the examples, I'm sure within the next few years, a lot of the examples today,
I can't think of many that aren't still current, they're all products that people still use.
But I think in the next few years, there'll probably be new companies that I don't think
I mentioned Slack in the book, because it was published back in 2014.
But there's been a lot of, I think, very interesting things happening when it comes to the enterprise
space.
If things haven't changed too much in recent years, I'd love to hear your thoughts on where
they're heading in the future.
Do you think the most impactful change we're going to see is a deepening of our understanding
of the habit-forming processes in our minds and how to take advantage of them?
Or do you think the more impactful change will be sort of a broadening of our ability
to apply what we know across a wider breadth of industries?
So we'll see more than just gaming companies learning how to effectively create habits
in their users.
I think we're going to see the world becoming a better place because we can master our habits.
I'm very long on human ingenuity.
And I think what we can do with this technology is to help people live the kind of lives they
want to live, but to date, haven't lived because doing the things they want to do is too hard.
And I think that the technology is this amazing enabler of reducing user friction so that
they can actually do the things they want.
And so I'm very bullish.
I think that, you know, I've seen already, I put my money where my mouth is, and I invest
in companies that use the hook model and just to name a few, I invested in Seven Cups, which
uses the hook to bring psychotherapy to hundreds of thousands of people every single week all
over the world.
I invested in a company called Bite Foods, which builds healthy habits around food by
putting these almost vending machine-like devices in office buildings and within food
deserts, changing food habits.
I invested in a company called Kahoot, which changes habits in the classroom.
So we're really scratching the surface of what habit-forming technology can do.
And I think as technology becomes more pervasive and persuasive, we can help use these technologies
to do the behaviors we want to do.
Yeah, I like that optimistic version of the future.
It's easy to, I think, to look at it pessimistically as well.
I mean, I think they're not mutually exclusive.
I think there's both good and bad things happening here.
Just to give you a few examples, like you said earlier, people can use the hooked model
to facilitate addictions.
But even outside of addictions in the content industry, for example, we see a lot of people
taking advantage of our understanding of triggers to write sensationalist or clickbait headlines
just to drive as many clicks as possible and spur people to action.
And the bad guys here, so to speak, can have an effect on the rest of their industry and
the good guys, because if you see all your competitors using these techniques, then suddenly
now you have to employ them, too, if you want to stay relevant and competitive.
And in some industries, it drives kind of a race to the bottom.
Yeah, but I'm not worried, and I'll tell you why.
Because clickbaity companies don't use the hooked model because they don't have a model
to use it.
Now, Facebook benefits from the hooked model, but you don't come to clickbaity websites
out of habit for very long because you realize they're stupid-fucking clickbaity headlines.
And so people, it's very hard to keep selling people a product that hurts them.
I mean, think about that for a minute.
How many products do you keep buying, do you keep consuming, if they hurt you?
Right now, addiction is a separate category.
When you talk about addiction, when you talk about people who smoke, people who drink too
much, people who gamble too much, people who are addicted to online pornography, that is
a situation where people keep punching themselves in the face every day because they cannot
stop.
So there's a special category for addiction.
But for the vast majority of people out there, we're not talking about addiction.
If you read enough stupid clickbaity headlines from BuzzFeed or whatever, guess what?
You stop reading it.
If Facebook is getting on your nerves because you keep checking it, you know what most people
do?
They uninstall Facebook, right?
They moderate their behaviors.
I mean, human beings for all time, whenever there's a technological shift, there's always
bad that come with the goods.
But you know how we get out of that?
We adapt our behaviors and we adopt new technology to put the bad aspects of the technology in
its place.
Right?
Think about the Industrial Revolution.
So much good came out of the Industrial Revolution, right?
Nobody wants to go back to the days before cars and airplanes and all the good things
that the Industrial Revolution gave us.
But of course, now we have global warming, right?
So of course it's going to give us a curse.
There's always a curse.
So the solution to all these bad aspects of the technology is more technology to fix those
bad aspects.
I mean, 1.25 million people die every year in automobile accidents.
None of those people would die had it not been for the Industrial Revolution.
But the way we reduce auto fatalities is not by going backwards.
It's too late.
We'll never go back.
We have to invent new technologies that make automobiles safer and safer.
That's exactly what we've done.
Carf fatalities per mile are lower than ever and I think we're going to see the same thing
with technology.
And I totally agree with you, by the way.
I don't think the answer is to take a step backwards.
I'm a technophile.
I love technology and I think not only is trying to stop progress and feasible, but
it's probably also less effective at solving problems, even problems created by technology.
But at the same time, there's kind of a tragedy of the commons problem to examine here as
well where people can do things that on an individual basis might seem okay or might
seem manageable.
But on a wider scale, these things can still have detrimental effects.
For example, I don't think it's a great thing that such a large percentage of content
is kind of converged on a small number of sensationalist clickbaity headlines.
Yeah, but when was this not the case in history?
By the way, I'm not defending these people.
I don't like their headlines either.
I don't read them, but just to put this in perspective, when was there not an age when
people consumed trash?
Oh, there's never been an age where people haven't consumed trash.
Yeah, you want to go back to the age of yellow journalism?
I mean, talk about fake news.
Look at the history of media.
This is probably the least fake news period in history.
I mean, Yuval Harari, who I really respect, he wrote the book Sapiens and Home ideas.
Great book, he has this great line where he talks about fake news.
What do you think religion is?
Right?
There's another one.
What's new here?
People believing mumbo-jumbo is not new.
Well, what's interesting to me here is I wonder if advancements in our understanding of psychology
will help us resist that.
You point out correctly that companies that want to do good in the world can use a hooked
model to help people build positive habits, but what about using and understanding the
hooked model to help people resist their negative habits?
That's right.
So I am just as lucky.
If you look at my blog, actually, about 50% of my writing is about how to build habit
forming products.
The other half of the writing is how to break the hook when it comes to these habits that
don't serve us.
So the way we do this is we look at the hook model and we figure out how do I remove the
triggers?
How do I make the action more difficult?
How do I delay the rewards and how do I make sure I don't invest?
And once you see the world through this lens, it is much easier to get your bad habits under
control and to propagate more good habits.
Yeah, I was going to ask you exactly which parts of the hooked model would you focus
on in order to break a habit?
And you mentioned investment.
What about the other three steps?
Are there things that you can do to break a habit?
Sure, yeah, absolutely.
For all four of the steps, you can devise ways to break the habit.
So the trigger, for example.
One thing I noticed, I was using Twitter too much.
It wasn't serving me.
I felt like I was serving it.
So I removed the trigger from my phone.
I uninstalled the app from my phone.
I still use Twitter.
I love Twitter.
But I don't want to use it when I should be hanging out with my wife, my friends, playing
with my daughter.
I don't want to use it during the day.
So I uninstalled that trigger on my home screen.
I deleted it from my phone.
How simple is that?
It turns out that about three quarters of smartphone users never adjust their notification
settings.
That's lunacy.
Right?
Everyone should take five minutes and turn off all those stupid notifications from the
apps that don't deserve to interrupt you.
How simple is that?
Next, the action phase.
Well, the action phase is about making the action easier to do if you're a product maker.
If you're trying to break a habit, it's about making that behavior harder to do.
So here's one habit that I wanted to break.
I noticed a few years ago that my sex life with my wife, I've been married now for over
15 years and our sex life was suffering, right?
We would go to bed and instead of snuggling, instead of being intimate with each other,
she was fondling her iPad and I was playing on my iPhone and that was not doing our relationship
any good.
So here's what we did.
We got a $10 outlet timer at Home Depot that every night at 10 p.m. automatically shuts
off our internet router.
Right?
Now there are actually internet routers that have this same ability built in, right?
If you have the ERO, E-E-R-O, is a great mesh network that actually has this built in.
You can turn off certain devices at certain times at night.
It's fantastic.
So I could go, if I wanted to, I could unplug the router or I could use a different way
to get online.
I could do that, right?
But what I've done is inserted a little bit of friction so that now I'm mindful as opposed
to mindless about how I use this technology, right?
How simple is that?
Then the variable reward phase.
Yeah.
I get super smart to attack it kind of in those earlier stages where you don't even
let it get to the point where you have this behavioral script that gets triggered and
you start going mindlessly into this process of, okay, now I can see these rewards and
then invest a little bit more.
I think people greatly underestimate the degree of how effective it is to put yourself in
a position where you don't even have to fight that battle.
Right.
Or just think for a minute, wait a minute, is this actually important?
Because if you're just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, you don't have the time to
think about is this actually serving me?
Yeah.
And hopefully knowledge about how to do these things will spread.
Because for someone like you, you're the person who knows how to form and break habits.
But for a lot of other people, they're just sort of being turned on to this stuff.
So it's brand new.
Yeah, I think we're seeing that already.
I think we're seeing a lot of people kind of wake up with the fact that, wait a minute,
you know what?
Like Instagram is not making me feel good.
Why do I keep checking in every day?
And I think that's great, right?
Just because I wrote the book on how to build this stuff.
I'm not an advocate for using all these products, if they don't do you good, stop using them.
You should be in control of what technology is helping you or hurting you.
That's really the message, by the way, just the last message I want to leave people with
that believing that you are powerless, believing that you're some kind of zombie at the will
of these technologies is the worst thing that you can believe.
There have been studies done on alcoholics.
And we know that alcoholics who believe that they are powerless to resist the temptation
of booze are the ones that are by far more likely to relapse.
So by propagating this myth that technology is addictive, that it's hijacking your brain,
you're actually doing yourself a disservice.
It's not hijacking your brain.
It's only, you're only powerless to resist it if you believe you are.
I like that as a point to end on and hopefully I don't ruin it, but I want to ask you one
more question.
If you've got time, please.
Hooked is one of the few nonfiction books that I've read recently that didn't seem
egregiously long.
It was actually a quick and pleasant read.
It only took a few hours and I got a lot out of it.
Alternatively, most similar books I've read felt much longer than they actually needed
to be, which has the unfortunate effect of making them a waste of time.
I realize you might be a bit biased here as an author yourself, but what are your thoughts
on this push and pull between being an aspiring entrepreneur and spending a lot of time reading
to avoid making the mistakes that other people have made versus jumping in and learning through
experience?
I think it's one of those things that the answer is an unsatisfactory answer, but turns
out to be pretty much the answer to life, which is it depends.
The answer to everything is it depends.
I think that in an entrepreneur's journey, I think that there is a phase when you don't
know anything that it's really good to get up to speed.
You need a base level of knowledge on what does an income statement look like, how does
a balance sheet tell you, what's a network effect, what's economies of scale.
There's certain fundamental concepts that I think behooves you to understand before
you dive into business.
It's really about finding that line for yourself.
But then at some point, what I see, I see a lot of people who are very book smart, but
very life dumb, in that they don't have any real world experience of what is it like to
go out and press the flesh and make a sales call and actually hit the street.
What does that actually feel like?
They've read about it in books, but the books can't tell you how to close a deal when it
comes to actually selling a product in front of a live human being.
That's something that you can only do if you go out into the field and do it.
The book is not going to give you that.
I think that at a certain stage, it's really about getting some base knowledge, and then
later on, it's about actually getting out in the field and trying and experimenting.
Because real innovation only occurs at the precipice of known knowledge.
There's a point where nobody knows what's going to happen next, and that's where innovation
occurs.
At some point, no book will tell you the answer.
Even mine, I can give you the archetype, I can give you the pattern, but how you actually
do it, only you will know.
You heard it here from Nira Yall.
Nobody does not control your life, and no book is going to give you the actual specific
answer when you come to the end of the road.
Nira, can you tell us where we can go to find out more about you and Hooked online?
Absolutely.
My blog is NIR and FAR.
NIR is spelled like my first name, N-I-R, N-I-R and FAR.com.
My book is called Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, and it's sold wherever.
Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
My pleasure.
This was really fun.
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