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Hooked Summary
To build habit-forming products, follow the Hook Model, a four-step process that taps into user psychology. First, trigger an action through external or internal cues, then reward the action with a variable outcome that keeps users engaged. Finally, leverage user investment, where small commitments increase future engagement, making the product a regular part of their lives.
Hooked Notes
These are my notes from Hooked by Nir Eyal. Each one contains a core idea from the book that stood out. The goal of writing my notes this way is that each could be it's own independent idea with the need for the specific context within the book.
The Big-Wave Surfing of Technology Waves
Mike Maples Jr. published a blog post in 2012 that detailed the patterns of technological waves. Every decade or so, a new wave comes. First, it was PCs, then servers, the internet, and social media, each one building on to the next one. Mike says there are 3 phases each one goes through. They start with infrastructure. Advances in infrastructure are the preliminary force that enables a large wave to gather. As the wave begins to gather, enabling technologies and platforms create the basis for new types of applications that cause a gathering wave to achieve mass penetration and customer adoption. Eventually, these waves crest and subside, making way for the next gathering wave to take shape. The opportunities for entrepreneurs are created when technology has suddenly made a behavior easier to do. The ability for others to complete complex behaviors becomes simplified.
Declared Versus Revealed Preferences
People don’t know what emotionally motivates them. If they did, all their needs and desires would be met. It’s an entrepreneur's job to understand how consumers' problems are being solved today so that they can give them exactly what they want. Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter said, "the Internet is a giant machine designed to give people what they want. We often have the broadest enabling tool to do all things... But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done." The best products are solving the timeless and universal needs that are revealed by what they prefer to do, not what they declare they want to do. The discrepancies between declared and revealed preferences are where opportunities are.
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