Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover takes a look at how new behaviors are shaping tech opportunities. Ryan blogs at ryanhoover.me and you can follow him on Twitter at rrhoover.
Startups that build a product attached to nascent behaviors have an opportunity to form habits before anyone else. (more…)
Perhaps no other phenomenon demonstrates our brain’s ability to make believe better than the placebo effect. (more…)
Nir’s Note: A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief post summarizing some thoughts for a potential book chapter. I asked my readers for help and you delivered! The comments were fantastic and I received several insightful emails. Therefore, I’ve decided to continue with the experiment with the article below. This week’s post is much shorter and less developed than my previous essays and is intended to solicit more of your thoughts and feedback for a potential book chapter. Give it a quick read and tell me what you think. —
Nir’s Note: This post is a little different from my normal writing. For one, its much shorter. You’ll notice I provide fewer citations and the ideas are less developed than my previous essays. This is intentional and I need your help. I’m considering writing a chapter on this topic in a forthcoming book but wanted to test the ideas with my most loyal readers first. Give it a quick read and tell me what you think. —
Habits are good for business. In fact, many industries could not survive without them. The incentive systems and business models of the companies that make habit-forming products require someone gets hooked. Without consumer habits, these habit-forming businesses would go bust.
While most of us think of cigarettes or gambling as habit-forming products, the fact is, (more…)
Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover, Director of Product at PlayHaven, utilizes my thinking on the “Habit Zone” to shed light on where Turntable.fm fell short. Ryan blogs at ryanhoover.me and you can follow him on Twitter at rrhoover.
Remember Turntable? When it first launched in May of 2011, the music service seemed to own the internet, growing from zero to over 420,000 monthly active users (MAU) only two months later1Turntable initially required Facebook to login and use the service. According to AppData, Turntable’s usage peaked at approximately 420K monthly active users in mid-July, 2011. .Unfortunately, that growth didn’t last long as many of its early adopters ditched the service. It is now estimated to have only 20 – 50,000 MAU’s, a fraction of its early peak.2AppData estimates just over 50K MAU’s for the month of February. In comparison, Compete estimates 20,375 MAU in January.
As I described nearly two years ago, much of Turntable’s success was due to its well-executed social engagement loop; however, that wasn’t enough. So what went wrong? (more…)
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