4 steps to turn a vitamin product into a painkiller
Today’s post is going to be a little special. In the spirit of growing my core readers (which is not going to be hard considering my actual stats), i am going to talk about drugs. Yeah, i need people to be hooked!
Is your idea a painkiller or a vitamin?
Wait, you really thought i was going to give you tips on how to get high?! Oops, sorry… But now that you are here, you should keep reading!
In startups, the best ideas come from existing problems that you are trying to solve, compared to a technical idea that actually doesn’t relate to any pain points. It is not an area where the chicken or the egg dilemma translates well: first the pain, then the solution. Ideally, you want to tackle an issue that touches you or a subject that you master. When you don’t experience the problem yourself, there are bits of information or reality that you can’t fully understand. You can try to gather more intelligence through extensive customer conversation and experimentation, but it will take more time and require lots of resources. It is hard to understand the extend of sexism when you are not a woman.
To make it simple, painkillers are ideas that address an obvious and functional need (i need lights in my house → need to have — even more after having seen Lights Out) while vitamins address emotional needs (let’s have mood enhancing light bulbs → nice to have, but i won’t die if i don’t have them — i swear it exists!). Both type can yield successful companies, though painkillers are more appealing to investors.
Shoot for the pain killers
Painkillers are a big deal to consumers. When you have a severe toothache, you want, well, actual painkillers but you mostly want your dentist to solve the problem as quickly as possible. Who cares about how much it cost, just make it stop!! There is great value attached to the solution. Okay, everybody hates the dentist so let’s find another example. When you are a small e-commerce company, you need to be able to process payments securely, efficiently and safely. You need Paypal.
It is way better to build something that a few people will love than something a lot of people will (only) like. If your first users love you, they will forgive your mistakes and most importantly tell everybody they know. If they only like your service (kind of), they will use it once or twice and then go away. If they go away, you are left with a ghost town. Good thing when it is Halloween, but keep in mind that it is only one weekend per year!
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
Painkillers are products that customers are telling you they need (i am not going back to candles lightning). They have a quantifiable market and they are monetizable. It is easier to capture value as people are willing to pay for your solution. It is more complicated with vitamins: it doesn’t seem like something we really need. They usually augment or improve existing solutions, which makes value creation harder to quantify and the market unknown.
Not every product was born a pain killer
Facebook ($379 billion market cap), Instagram (acquired for $1 billion), Snapchat ($25 billion IPO valuation), to name a few, didn’t start as painkillers. Nobody woke up one day with the terrible need to share pictures of their food online. These products started as nice to have (vitamins) and became painkillers. But wait, how is it possible? Simple, they succeeded in creating habits around their products. Habits are like a powerful spell that make the average millennial checks their phone more than 150 times a day for example. True story! A vitamin product can become painkiller if you create habits.
How technology change behaviors
Habits are behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. It is critical at this point to include consumer’s psychology and build a framework based on how people actually behave. Asking users what they want is not enough. A lot of unarticulated needs drive behaviors. Startups can leverage the psychology of “habits design” to help people live more fulfilling lives by using the “hook model” (a must read!). The hook is a model designed to connect your user’s problem to your solution with enough frequency to form a habit. It is a 4 steps process that starts out with a trigger, an action, a reward and an investment.
1/You need a trigger
Triggers prompt us to action without a lot of thoughts processing. They are small behaviors that we do seeking a reward. Triggers comes in two types: internal and external. External triggers are familiar to designers. They are call to actions built within the user’s environment: “buy button”, “click here”, “share now”. What designers don’t think about enough is the internal triggers. Internal triggers are contained within the user’s memory, through an association. It is basically telling us what to do in response of certain emotions. When you feel lonely you are more likely to go on Facebook. When you are unsure about an answer, you Google it. When you are feeling bored, you go on Youtube and watch videos of cats. Negative emotions don’t feel good — that’s why they are negative. Therefore, we, as humans, seek remedies, painkillers. As a founder, you need to clearly understand what is the internal trigger your product is forming an association with. What are your users fighting with your product? Then you need to articulate the right external trigger that prompts your users to action. The hook model is a self-reinforcing process: the more users pass through the 4 steps of the hooks, the more they begin to associate your product with other internal triggers. Instagram answered the need to hold on to a moment. It became popular through social contagion and external call to action (“sign up here”). Now it is way more than just that. It grew up to be a social network that users use when they are feeling bored, seeking connections etc.
2/An action phase
An action is defined as the simplest behavior in anticipation of a reward. It is as simple as a scroll on Pinterest, pressing play on Youtube or a search on Google. For any behavior to occur, we need sufficient motivation, sufficient ability and a trigger (BJ Fogg model → B = m + a + t).
Motivation is the energy for action: how much do we want to do something. Right now, i have no energy to work. But i’m sure i would find some if i was seeking pleasure (satisfaction of accomplishment), avoiding pain (not getting fired), seeking hope (of a promotion), avoiding fear (of a mean discussion with my boss), seeking acceptance (of my peers) or avoiding rejection (seek/avoid).
Ability is the capacity of adopting a particular behavior: how easy or hard it is to do something. Everything else being constant, i am more able if the behavior doesn’t take much of my time, cost too much money, requires too much physical effort, too much brain power (the harder something is to understand the less likely the behavior is to occur), make me suffer from social deviance (i am more likely to wear skinny jeans if all my friends wear them — or i should just change friends) and repetitive (the more you code the better you get and the easier it becomes → importance of habits).
You want to provide your users with enough motivation and ability. If i don’t pick up the phone it is either because i lack the motivation (no, i don’t want to buy you toner!), the ability (i genuinely can’t leave my Ted talk hanging) or the trigger (i didn’t hear the phone ring). You need motivation, ability and trigger for each behaviors you want your user to adopt!
3/A reward phase
Now it’s time to give them what they came for. But to activate the willingness of your users to come back, you need to give them some unknown. Unknown is fascinating, increase focus, engagement and is highly “habit forming”. You will watch your football team every week because you don’t know if they are going to win (unless you are a Bears fan, and then you know it’s not going to happen). “Variable reward” is the unknown applied to business. All of the most engaging applications are using variable rewards to hook users. Think about all the variability in a Facebook feed: what did people post, how many people liked my last status, what are the comments saying etc?
4/And an investment phase
The investment phase is about loading the future reward and increasing the likelihood of the next pass through the hook. First, it loads the next trigger. When I send a message on Messenger, I don’t get any instant reward (unless you are laughing at your own jokes, which i do). What you are doing is investing in the next reward (the response you will get). And every time I send a message I am more likely to use the app. The investment phase is also a great storage of value. While physical products lose value the more you use them, habit forming technologies have the opportunity to appreciate with use. The more playlist I have in Spotify, the more likely it is to become my primary (only) music library. The more followers I have on Twitter and the more valuable it becomes to reach my audience. The better my rating is on Airbnb the more business I get. Each pass through the hooks helps shape user preferences and attitudes.
Conclusion
Using the hook model helps the founding team get the right product sooner. It starts by taking some time to figure out what are your hooks. Before doing any code, figure out what is the core experience that you want to turn into a habit and ask yourself if you have the fundamental characteristics of a habit forming technology: 1/ have you identified the internal trigger, 2/ what is the external trigger that prompts the next action, 3/ what is the intended behavior and how can it be made as simple as possible, 4/ what is the variable reward (how are you giving the user what they want but leaving them wanting more) and 5/ what is the bit of work that the user does to prompt the next action, load the next trigger and store value in the product? If you have those question in mind you can design accordingly and integrate that thinking inside the product and turn a vitamin into a painkiller.
Stay hooked…
