So, Product Hunt has been blowing up.
What do you think made them so successful?
>> So, Product Hunt is an interesting story because my contributing author
on the book is a guy by the name of Ryan Hoover,
who was working a job at a startup that he was okay with.
He wasn't super happy about.
But Ryan emailed me one day and said, hey, I've been reading your articles on
TechCrunch, and I like this consumer psychology stuff.
How can I help you?
So we got together for lunch one day, and I said, look,
I've got all these articles.
I've been thinking about putting them together in a book.
Do you think you could kind of help me make them into this cohesive book,
as opposed to a bunch disparate articles?
And he did. We worked on it for several months, and
he did a fantastic job.
I really enjoyed working with him.
Well, there's nobody who understand the hook model second to me
better than Ryan.
And the next thing that Ryan did after we worked on this book
was to start Product Hunt.
And he designed Product Hunt from the get-go with the hook model in mind.
Now the company is doing phenomenally well.
I'm lucky enough to be an investor.
So full disclosure, I happen to be a fan for a number of reasons.
But, yeah, the app is doing incredibly well because it was designed with this
hook at the early days of the product design.
And of course, Ryan and his team get 110% of the credit for this.
I have the easy part of just talking about the theory,
but they had to actually implement it.
But I think they saved themselves a lot of time and
found the right thing sooner by using the model.
>> And now I as a new entrepreneur can do the same?
>> Right, so again, I am a little biased here.
But I think it starts by taking some time to figure out your hook.
Before you've laid down any code, before you've done any wire frames, just
to think about what the core experience is that you want to turn into a habit.
And then ask yourself, do you have the fundamental characteristics of a habit
forming technology, by number one, have you identified the internal trigger?
Do you know your users' itch?
Number two, what's the external trigger that
gives the user some piece of information to do the intended action?
Number three, what's the intended behavior, and
how can it be made as simple as possible?
Number four, the variable reward is how are you giving the user what they want,
scratching their itch, and yet leaving them wanting more.
And then finally, the investment phase, the fifth question,
is what's the bit of work that the user does to prompt the next action,
to load the next trigger, and to store value in the product.
And if you can answer those five questions, and
you have this core hook in your mind, you can design accordingly.
And it becomes much easier to build the right thing sooner.
>> Can I use the same model on existing products?
>> Sure. So,
it's a little bit more difficult because as you know,
once you've built a product, it's kind of hard to change it, right?
You've done all the architecting.
People have worked hundreds of hours on it.
It's harder to change and so, what oftentimes I see people doing is
I'll get emails from an entrepreneur or a product manager.
And they'll say to me look, we've been struggling with this product, and
until we read your book, we couldn't figure out why people weren't using it.
Right, we put so much effort into building it, and
we didn't know what was going on.
A few customers were telling us they really liked it,
but even they weren't using it.
So then the book can become a diagnostic tool where you can figure out oh,
this is why people aren't coming back.
We haven't identified the right internal trigger.
The external trigger isn't effective.
The action is too difficult.
The reward isn't very rewarding.
Or we're not asking people for the investment at the right time.
So then it becomes a diagnostic tool, and
then you can of course correct from there.
>> So what hooks does Product Hunt have?
>> Sure, so I think Product Hunt has a great hook.
It's something that people use on a daily basis.
I think their hook is very reliant on this external trigger of
getting an email.
So you get this daily email from Product Hunt that says hey,
here's the latest and greatest in technology products.
The action then is to open the email and to reveal the variable reward.
Now, the variable reward is this uncertainty about, well what is it?
What is the latest and greatest, right?
You're looking through all these various products to see one that might be
interesting to you.
You click on one of those products.
If you go to the Product Hunt discussion page, there's all these discussions
happening about people talking with the founders of these products.
There's this great community formed around these products.
And the more you interact with that community by commenting,
by sharing things to that community, by creating collections,
all of these things load the next trigger and store value.
So the next time it won't be your daily digest anymore.
Now it'll be an email from oh, this is your friend who you trust, who just
posted something to Product Hunt prompting you to come back again, right?
That's a piece of information that you've given the company
that can now send you through that four steps of the hook once again.
The more you use the product, and this is where I think investors think
the company can grow outside of just technology,
is that it learns your tastes.
It learns what you're into.
And so hopefully over time that hook expands into all different kinds
of interesting industry areas.
>> So understanding me and giving me more relevant results.
>> Right, exactly.
That's part of this investment phase.