How to Drive Growth by Making Your Product More Addictive
Volley, the Hook Model, and the Importance of Retention
“If you don’t understand your retention, then nothing else matters.” — Brian Balfour (VP Growth, HubSpot)
How do you improve retention? Well, you need to keep bringing users back. The problem is, users don’t do this by themselves. Human behaviour is incredibly hard to change, and we need to rewire brains. We need to create habits.
In the following post, I’ll show you how to build habits around your product by critiquing a real-life startup. On the way, I’ll introduce you to a proven habits model and reveal a handful of tactics that can be applied to any product.
CASE STUDY: VOLLEY
What is Volley?
Volley is young company with a lot of potential. With a strong show of support from Product Hunt, a recent large seed round, and a solid user base, the new platform has shown promising progress since launching in 2014.
The concept of Volley is simple. It’s a community based around creating and answering requests. Or, as creator Mike Murchison says, it’s a “friendly place for helping others”. On the platform, users are encouraged to do three basic things:
- Create requests to reach people with relevant expertise beyond their current network.
- Respond to requests to help community members with their experience.
- “Volley” requests to knowledgeable connections within their network.
I love the concept of Volley, and while I do see addictive elements in the product, I can’t help but think it could be much stickier. Even as an enthusiastic user myself, I’m not compelled to use it regularly. I’m not hooked.
Luckily, habit-forming products have a recipe.
The Hook Model
In his recent book, Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, user psychology guru Nir Eyal suggests that all habit-forming products follow a similar iterative cycle:
- Trigger: Bringing a user into the cycle starts with a trigger. At first these are in the form of external triggers such as push notifications, but as the cycle repeats they convert into internal triggers that continue to drive the user forward. Since negative emotions can be powerful internal triggers, an example of this is a pang of loneliness followed by the urge to jump onto Facebook.
- Action: The easier it is to do something, the more users will do it. Habit forming products make action easy.
- Variable reward: To create a habit, it’s necessary to reward the action that was triggered. However, research shows that humans are motivated by the anticipation of a reward. By adding variability into the reward system, you increase anticipation. Think about that hopeful anticipation that you might have a notification waiting for you on Facebook.
- Investment: Finally, to solidify the habit, users need to invest themselves in your product. On Facebook we build a network of friends, and on Instagram we have collection of photos. These investments make it hard to leave.
These are the basics of habit-driven design. Let’s see how Volley can put this model to work.
Applying the Hook Model to Volley
Volley is exactly the type of product that could be addictive. It occupies a sweet spot where it offers enough value to users and can be used fairly frequently.
Before we dig into the model, we need to look at these two elements carefully:
How do users get value from Volley?
- By receiving quality responses from real people and making new connections in the process.
- By helping others.
How often should people use Volley?
- 3–5 times per week sounds about right. This would provide a steady influx of requests and responses.
And based on these — what behaviours do we want to make into habits?
- Making a request on Volley when you have a problem that can’t be solved with a Google search but could be solved if you could talk to the right person.
- Jumping onto Volley to answer or volley requests.
Now that we’ve got some habits to form, let’s develop some triggers to bring users into the cycle.
1. Trigger
Internal Triggers
Before we can start coming up with external triggers, we need to determine what internal triggers will ultimately take over. To do this, we’ll need to go deep into the minds of Volley’s target users: developers, designers, and entrepreneurs.
Nir Eyal gives us an awesome way to do this: act like a five-year-old. Remember when you used to ask “Why?” so many times that your parents legitimately considered putting you up for adoption? Now you need to ask this question about your user, and you need to ask it five times in a row.
In Volley’s case it looks a bit like this:
1. Why would user want to use Volley?
- Askers: So they can get answers to their requests.
- Helpers: So they can help people by responding to requests.
2. Why would they want to do that?
- Askers: So they can solve a problem they’re experiencing.
- Helpers: So they can share their expertise with others.
3. Why would they want to do that?
- Askers: So they can conquer challenges.
- Helpers: So they can feel validated, and connect with others.
4. Why would they want to do that?
- Askers: So they can constantly improve and enrich their life.
- Helpers: So they know that they’re making an impact on the world. So they can build relationships.
5. Why would they want to do that?
- Askers: Because they fear stagnation and crave progress.
- Helpers: Because they want to have a sense of purpose and belonging.
This exercise draws out some incredibly interesting insights. We now have some powerful emotions we can leverage as internal triggers.
With these triggers in mind, we can visualize how our habit might happen in practice:
- Askers: Every time someone fears they can’t solve a problem on their own, they ask a question on Volley.
- Helpers: Every time someone feels a need for purpose, they jump onto Volley to help someone.
For the remainder of this post, I’ll focus on building a habit around the latter scenario — helping others. While both habits are important for the company, I think this one deserves the most attention. There are two reasons for this:
- With more people answering requests, more people are likely to ask them.
- Conveniently, responses will act as a powerful external trigger for the Askers.
External Triggers
Now we need to come up with external triggers that can be sent around our internal trigger. We’ll need to be strategic about the timing and medium of these triggers.
While there are a lot of possibilities, I think the morning is a good candidate for our trigger. A little bit of purpose gets us out of bed in the morning. And — much like bacon — this is when we crave it. A daily email featuring “Top Requests” would work well here, triggering users just as they seek out purpose for their day ahead. Eventually, this could be a tailored email featuring requests based around subject areas specific users are interested in.
Product Hunt uses a similar scheme in the form of their daily “Top Hunts” email. My desire to be in the know drives me to Product Hunt, and this daily external trigger helped wire that behaviour into my brain.
Additional external triggers will help bring users into the cycle more often, and Volley has a lot more possibilities here.
Here are some triggers they already use:
- An email notification when a user marks a reply as “Helpful” (they just added this before I could hit publish — beat me to it!)
- A notification when someone volleys a request to you (also a great way to acquire new users)
Other triggers I’d like to see implemented:
- A notification when a request I volley results in a response or was marked as “helpful”.
- A notification when someone posts a request in a subject area that I am interested in.
- Enabling @ mentions that could draw users back in if they are referenced in a response.
Now, with our triggers loaded, it’s time to promote action.
2. Action
This is where Volley excels. The team has done a great job of reducing friction, thereby making action easy.
Let’s take a look at the process for helping someone with a request:
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Or, in the case of volleying a request:
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Three steps is very good, and as a user myself, this process feels pretty effortless. In addition to an efficient process, action is made easier by enforcing concise requests and responses. By limiting these to 500 and 1500 characters respectively, precious resources required from the user — time and effort — are minimized.
How could Volley further promote action?
- Making requests easier to find: A user could jump onto Volley, only to find that the requests they’re qualified to answer are buried beneath others. This would require a lot of scrolling, and is another good argument for personalizing the user experience around specific interest categories.
- Improving volleying process: As you can see above, uncertainty during the volleying process causes anxiety and impedes action. A few UX changes could go a long way here.
3. Variable Reward
Our users have behaved well and performed our desired action. It’s time to reward them. But as we learned earlier, we have to add variability. Anticipation is everything. Volley’s advantage here — and one of the reasons why it has such potential to be habit-forming — is that the product itself is inherently variable.
To create effective rewards, we can start by listening to users and finding out what they find particularly enjoyable about Volley.
“I’ve also been using Volley since last summer-ish. I would log onto Volley, answer a few requests and volley off some others, and then later in the week would be pleasantly surprised by thoughtful responses and connections…” (comment posted on Product Hunt)
“Pleasantly surprised by thoughtful responses and connections” you say? We can work with that. This reward is a core feature of the product, it’s variable (since other people are involved), and it fits in directly with our internal trigger of purpose and belonging.
This is exactly the idea behind Volley’s feature where Askers can mark a Helper’s response as “helpful”. Helpers crave the purpose and belonging that comes with this virtual pat on the back.
How else could Volley use variable rewards?
- Adding in optional messages: Allowing the Asker to include a brief message when flagging a response as “helpful” would increase the variability and intensity of the reward.
- Including a points system: Much like Redditors are in an endless pursuit of “karma”, points awarded for helpful responses and volleys could motivate Volley users by providing them with a sense of accomplishment.
4. Investment
To complete the cycle, we need to get users to invest themselves in Volley. We need to make it harder for them to imagine not coming back. This is an area where Volley falls short.
At the moment, the only investment Volley encourages users to make in the product is a simple profile. With some development, this profile could become a trophy case for the work they’ve put into Volley. While requests currently populate here, adding in responses and volleys would help make the profile a user’s proud investment. This is another argument for incorporating a points system, since the user’s score — another signal of their investment — could be displayed here.
Another important aspect of the investment phase is loading the next external trigger. This is necessary because users won’t get hooked after going through the cycle only once. Successive cycles are needed to form a habit.
One way Volley could do this is by prompting users to select categories that they have expertise in. With this information, Volley could now send them daily email notifications with new requests tailored to them. This external trigger would bring them back in, starting the cycle again.
Bringing it All Together
Having walked through the entire model, you should now understand how you can apply the psychology of habits to your own product.
In the case of Volley, using well-timed external triggers, optimizing their UX, enhancing variable rewards, and encouraging user investment will equip them to form strong user behaviours around their product.
By hooking people in this way, Volley will keep new users coming back for more. And the benefits of this are many.
Users who stick around longer tell their friends about you and they represent more value for you in the long term. Acquisition efforts are amplified and organic growth happens more rapidly.
Remember this when building your own product. Focus on bringing users back, and then you’ll win.
What habits are you trying to form around your product?
How would you make Volley more addictive?
Let me know on Twitter, or shoot me an email.
Want to learn more about growth marketing? Check out my free course here.
Note: I have no affiliation with Volley — I’m just a user.
