Building a business is hard.
Building an app has become easy. But how does your app become a business? How does your product lead to the retention and success of users and customers?
We live in a world that demands speed and precision. We want our apps to work and perform the job they were designed to do in the most efficient way. We want these apps to be “three clicks to success”.
I recently sat in an advisory meeting with a startup where I was trying to distil the essence of questions a founder needs to answer. I fundamentally understood the product and the need, but I did not see the emotional hook. Why are people going to keep going back? Much to the CTO’s disgust, I proclaimed “the technology was the easy part!”
If you juxtapose the need to build a “quick and dirty” product against the need to build for humans, you cannot win. Reid Hoffman has always said if you are not embarrassed by the first product you took too long to release it.
But what is wrong with building for this? A feature stack does not build retention alone. And as I said, a feature stack is the easy part. The product stack and solution are what most founders focus on but how do you encapsulate the emotions of a human?
How do you make a user feel like they have been pulled into an app of their own volition and successfully unlocked the exact value they sought (or did not even know they needed)?
The author of Hooked, Nir Eyal, says that any habit-forming product needs to have an action in anticipation of a variable reward. The action needs to be linked to motivation. The user needs to feel a pull towards the product to use it. Psychologically, this pull is for a human to seek pleasure and avoid pain, seek hope and avoid fear. These are human emotions. These are the inner-thinking and desires. For an app that is supposed to be precise and fast. An app that needs to do a single job.
This is a hard problem, but not insurmountable:
- Build for a market you have identified and identify their emotional triggers upfront. Never underestimate the problem to be solved and never underestimate how difficult it is to predict human behaviour.
- Use the Hook Cycle to identify when and where the emotions of humans can be used as triggers and use cases for your product. Think about the flow of the product, understand the entry method and how to get consumers back. A one-time customer is impossible to monetize.
- Make technology an enabler of the problem-solving behaviour. Technology is everywhere. Developers can be found a dime a dozen. What makes businesses is that technology answers hard foundational truths. It enables the product to function. But then by definition, it is secondary.
(Disclaimer: This is obviously not the case with incredibly complex technological issues in artificial intelligence and blockchain – this is for the “normal” app builder).
The answer is actually simple: think about emotions and the problem to be solved by the app, plan and validate these two things and then build. Build for humans. Tap into the emotions of your users and their problems and the solution you want to offer. Build for emotional users.
