Letter #183: Lenny Rachitsky (2012)
Founder of Lenny's Newsletter | How to make your app a habit
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Today’s letter is the transcript of an interview with Lenny Rachitsky, who shares his thoughts on how to take an app from a novelty into a habit. He talks about building habits for successful services, leveraging push notifications and email to reinforce user engagement, solving more problems for users, discusses app success and user engagement, and emphasizes the importance of creating valuable and desired products that people want.
Lenny Rachitsky is the author and creator of Lenny’s Newsletter, which has over 650k subscribers, and its accompanying podcast and job board. Prior to creating Lenny’s Newsletter, Lenny was a Product Lead at Airbnb, which he joined when they acquired his startup Localmind. Before founding Localmind, Lenny was Head of R&D for Neustar, which he joined when they acquired Webmetrics. He started his career as a web developer for LA.com.
I hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did! It’s fun seeing how an early Lenny thought, and it’s clear that he has always had a certain clarity of thought and product orientation.
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
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Transcript
Yeah, so something I've been thinking a lot about recently is habits, and the importance of habits, and the importance of building a habit around your service.
If you look at most successful services, especially consumer services, free services, there's 600,000 apps in the App Store. There's, I don't know, a bazillion websites out there.
How do you get people coming back to your service over and over and over? And it turns out that everything is kind of built around a habit that people develop around the service. Like Facebook, every time you think of, Hey, I did something interesting. I'm gonna go to Facebook and post it. I'm looking for a place to eat, I'll go to Yelp and look it up. There's something beautiful in the world. I'm going to Instagram that. Or I just arrived at the restaurant. I'm going to check in on Foursquare.
And so what I've noticed is that you want to build that habit as quickly as possible so that people remember you when they think of a specific trigger. And so I've been doing a lot of research into how to build a habit. And there's basically three parts to it: there's the cue, there's the actual routine of the actual habit, and then there's the reward that comes afterwards. And so what you got to do is figure out what's that cue that you want to associate your service with--like, I'm hungry, or I'm tired, or I'm gonna go to sleep, or I want to watch TV--and you associate your service with that cue so that every time that cue comes up, they think of your service.
So the importance of building that habit, and how do you actually accomplish the habit building? There's a few things that we've done that have worked really well. One is we basically realized that push notifications are this incredible tool that people really under utilize. You really have this power to notify all your users, anytime you want, anytime of day, for free, and almost be guaranteed that they see your message when you send a push notification. And so you can't go crazy. You can't--there's a point at which people get upset and annoyed and delete your app. But push notifications are a great way to remind users that you exist and to provide value to them when they forget about your service. And so when we look for is opportunities to send our users something valuable with a push that reminds them, Oh, yeah, LocalMind exists. So they open it up, ideally, and it reinforces that habit.
Another tool that I've seen used is email. And just using email. Foursquare seems to be doing a lot more of just sending you digests every week of just like Hey, we exist, here's cool stuff that's happening. Twitter's working on something like that, I think. Quora has been doing a great job with this. Groupon kind of built that habit around I'm getting this email every day--whenever I think of a deal, I'm gonna think of Groupon. And so really, it comes down to being in front of your users as much as possible, and reminding them of why you exist and where they should think about you when they're going about their daily lives.
So one thing that we learned really early and that was really important is that the first problem that we tried to solve, which was: Is a place busy right now? Is a place fun right now? Is a park open right now? It is a great problem. And people have that problem. But they don't have that problem often. How often do you really need to know how busy a bar is, or how expensive a restaurant is right now, or if a park is open? When you do need to know that, it's awesome that there's somebody there, they can tell you. And that's gonna--that's a magical, miracle moment. But we learned that we need to solve a problem that's much more common. Because if you don't, people forget about you. And they don't come back to your service.
You become a daily tool, or at least a weekly tool, that they open up every day or week. And if you don't, they forget about you and they move on--unless you're really lucky. And so what we learned is we need to figure out more common problems that we need to solve for people, more consistent problems. And so in our case, it was: Okay, maybe you don't always need to know if a bar is busy right now, but you need to know what's a cool bar in this area, or what's the best sushi date spot in the Embarcadero, or something like that. And so we've learned that we need to expand kind of the scope of the problems we're trying to solve, kind of creep further and further out. Both in terms of how wide of an area you can kind of find out about and how long lasting that information is. Instead of: Is a bar busy right now? Is this bar generally busy? Or what's a good bar in this area? Yeah, our kind of metric around what we want to accomplish is we want to be in the top seven apps that people use. It feels like there's about seven apps that people use daily. And so if you can get into that bucket, you've won. So that's a goal of ours.
So in order to get into kind of that habit loop, there's the queue, and then there's also the reward: what do you give the person at the end of that experience? Instagram, they give you a beautiful photo that you share with your friends. Foursquare, you get some points and badges. With Facebook, you maybe get likes and confirmation from your friends. So, very important to provide a really positive reward. In our case, we want to make sure you get an answer really quickly. Because if you put in all this effort, type in a question, find a place, send the question, and don't get anything back, that loop's never gonna form. And so, make sure that there's a consistent reward.
How do you make--how do you give people enough reason to use your app and your service over the kind of the status quo? And that's a big problem that almost every service fails, because the status quo is good enough, and have no reason to do anything new. And what you want to do is--not only do you want to solve a problem that people have, but you want to make sure you solve it in a really big way, where your life becomes 10x better, not just incrementally better. Almost every service out there is just trying to kind of incrementally improve your life by giving a small little new service or new tool. And so if your service doesn't actually give them enough reward and enough value out of using it, they're never going to use it.
And so, simple answer is: make sure that you're building something that people really want to use and really value, because they'll want to use it. I think it just comes down to: build something that people actually want to use. There's a lot of opportunity to build cool things and fun things, and there's a lot of opportunity to build what you think you need. But always come back to: Are you building something people actually want to use. And that's really hard to find out quickly--the whole lean startup movement is trying to solve that problem. And it's hard to always keep coming back to it, but anytime you decide on anything, anytime you try to figure out which direction your company should go, figure out what's going to move the needle on having your users actually want to use it and provide actual value to them, and make sure that they actually want to use it.
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