How Lunchclub keeps its users hooked
In my previous story, I introduced Lunchclub and analysed how they nailed Product-Led Growth. In this article, I try to discuss about the other 2 pillars of their success — User Delight and Retention strategies.
Let’s study this from a Hook model as it fits the criteria of building a habit-forming product.
Hooked Model
Trigger: External trigger is that you’re invited to try Lunchclub by someone you know, who had a good experience with the product. Lunchclub does a good job of showing you possible internal triggers (picture below) to see if your intent matches. If you don’t have a motivation to network, you won’t make interesting conversations and probably not benefit from Lunchclub.
Action: Once user is onboarded, they need to do 3 simple actions to really get hooked to the product.
- Tell Lunchclub who you’d like to meet. Think of you swiping some hypothetical profiles left or right to let the app know your preferences.
- Give Lunchclub upto 3 slots of when they can set a meeting for you
- Show up to the meeting
Variable Reward: Reward here is the meeting itself. Variability of the reward is why I think it’s the most crucial part of the hook.
- You don’t know who you’re meeting when you sign-up. You only get to know them 1–2 days before the actual meeting.
- There are times when your match is an accomplished individual and you hope to have a great conversation but it turns out a disappointment whereas there are times when you’re just meeting a random college student but you have an amazing conversation. The reward is truly variable in nature.
- Your reward can sometimes go much beyond your expectations. I’ve had follow-up conversations with 3 people I met on Lunchclub and they’re acquaintances, whom I can reach out anytime now.
Let’s consider a scenario: A is a founder who meets B, who is a VC, through Lunchclub. Next week, B meets another founder C. Lunchclub asks B if he’d like to introduce B to C as their interests match. There’s a possibility that Lunchclub helped A and C become co-founders and their venture receive funding from B. It might sound hypothetical but there are multiple levels of variable reward here, a huge appeal for those who seek this.
Investment: This is the last step of the hook and Lunchclub has several layers through which a user can do this investment. After every meeting, Lunchclub asks if you want to share a feedback or share about your meeting on Twitter or if you’d like to stay connected etc., and each response is an investment on to the platform. This helps Lunchclub find better matches for you in the future.
Gamification
The image below is a single snapshot of how Lunchclub does gamification. The goal here is to drive growth and retention.
Streak: Streak is one of the most common and effective gamification techniques today. Lunchclub has a weekly streak that encourages you to meet one person every week to keep your streak alive.
Clubpoints: Your actions (investment) such as referrals, meeting people, and giving feedback fetches you club points that you can redeem to refine your matches. For example, you can spend few club points and ask Lunchclub to match you with a person with a specific title or a specific geography. If you’re a founder using Lunchclub to find an investor, you’ve a motivation to be active on Lunchclub, gather club points and redeem them to meet relevant VCs.
Network Score: At it’s core, Lunchclub is a networking platform. Just how social media platforms such as Linkedin and Instagram’s users can measure number of “followers” as a metric to improve by consistent activity on the platform, Lunchclub came up with its own Network Score. As you make new connections (referrals and meetings), your network score improves. The calculation itself is slightly complicated. Increase in your network score is directly proportional to the network score of the user you’re connecting with. Lunchclub encourages you to have a network goal and meet and refer more people to meet that goal. It also shows you how you stack among the people you connected with in terms of network score.
User invitation tree and Super Inviters are the other gamification features that Lunchclub offers and I have covered them in my previous article.
Differentiation for a power user
One last thing I really like about Lunchclub is how it treated me when I first joined the platform vs after I’ve become a power user. Initially, you state your match preferences by swiping some profiles left or right but that’s just for the algorithm to train and assign the best match for you. However, I can now directly see some profiles with the free time as shown below. If I’m interested and available at that time slot, I can directly book a meeting.
If you read till here and want to try the platform, use my invite link here. If there are other apps whose retention and engagement strategies inspires you, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear (and try) them.
