A summary of things you should know about Captivology according to Ben Parr: Introduction In this episode Ben Parr shares all his insights on his book, Captivology, where he presentsRead More
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]]>In this episode Ben Parr shares all his insights on his book, Captivology, where he presents a unique understanding of capturing people’s attention.
In his book Parr reveals his latest research on the psychology and neuroscience on what attracts consumers and convinces them to support certain areas of a business product or service. The goal of the book is to help you create effective advertising campaigns, deliver high quality presentations, delegate the right jobs to the right people, and bring your product to the attention of millions of prospects.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who understand the importance of building a following but are having trouble attracting and engaging the right consumers with a product or service.
What I set out to do was not write a marketing or social media book. There is a lot of scientific research and information in this book and I don’t base my suggestions or triggers on my gut feeling. I actually went through the actual science and 1,000 research studies to truly understand the subject at a fundamental level.
I think that you can jump in and out but you are going to get the most benefit by reading it front to back.
The one thing that I’ve learned from all the research I did and all the people I interview was the masters of attention don’t try to capture attention for themselves, they try to capture attention for their projects, passions, and ideas. I want people to think of attention as this positive tool for whatever they do.
The book is divided into two key sections and I’ll describe some of the key pieces and findings.
The first part is what I call The Three Stages of Attention and I go through the new model that I found for how attention works and how we should think of attention. Everybody seems to think of attention as this kind of short-term or reactionary thing or short-term focus but that’s not really the attention and the fundamentals. Attention is really a memory construct and it goes on three stages which are immediate attention, short attention, and long attention. With these three attentions I don’t think many people think about how to walk their audience through all three, they just focus on how to get initial attention. So I talk a lot about walking your audience through those three stages of attention.
The key and the structure of the book is around seven captivation triggers and these are the seven psychological triggers that kept coming up through my research that capture your attention across all three stages. The seven triggers are automaticity, framing, disruption, reward, reputation, mystery, and acknowledgement. Automaticity understands the automatic reaction we have to certain sights, sounds, and colors. Framing is about our frame of reference and how our frame of reference based on our world experience, really does change the way in which we pay attention. Disruption is that we pay attention to the people and things that violate our expectations. Then you have reward and the reward system is one that is not fully understood. Reputation is that we pay attention to reputable source specifically experts, authority figures, and the crowd. Mystery is one of the final triggers and it’s when we pay attention to incomplete story lines and thoughts. The most prayerful trigger of them all is acknowledgment and that is when we pay attention to the people and things that provide us with validation, empathy, and understanding.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:08
“Attention is the most important currency that anybody can give you. It’s worth more than money, possession, or things.” – Ben Parr
I am the author of Captivology and also the founder of DominateFund which is an early stage venture fund that coaches startups on attention and how to capture attention for their products. My original claim to fame in the tech industry was that I was the co-editor and editor-at-large of Mashable.
I was initially inspired by entrepreneurs. When I first left Mashable and I started doing the venture fund and the kind of help that startups came to me for was all around attention. As I did my research I really came to realize that attention is the fundamental life blood of the modern economy and so that set me off the path of writing this book.
Quiet by Susan Cain
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Buy Captivology by Ben Parr on Amazon today
Visit Captivology.com to learn more about the book
Visit BenParr.com to learn more about Ben and his company
Follow Ben Parr on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Escape The Expected by Tom Trush
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Traction: A Startup Guide for Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management according to Jock Busuttil: Introduction In this episode Jock Busuttil takes a deep dive into hisRead More
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]]>In this episode Jock Busuttil takes a deep dive into his book, The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management, where he provides a roadmap for mastering product management and avoiding product failure.
In his book Busuttil shares real-life stories and experiences of other companies who are successful at product management and know what it takes to meet customers’ needs. The goal of the book is to help you improve product management skills, understand what a product manager does, know the difference between good and bad products, and increase the success rate of a product.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are new to the product management and looking for a step-by-step guide to creating, promoting, and selling a product that customers will love.
The main difference is that most product management books are telling you about the process and while there are values in those kinds of books I also felt the need to explain to the reader the realities of product management as well.
Each chapter is self-contained so if you want to read the five chapters in different orders you can.
First and foremost it has to be empathy, the ability to put yourself as a product manager into the shoes of your users, the customers, the people in your organization that help you create this fantastic product. And understand what their needs are over yours because ultimately you are not going to be the target market.
The purpose of chapter one is about understanding what exactly product management is and what it all involves. It’s thinking about this concept of bouncing what I call three rings which refers to a diagram that divides up the practices of product management into three main areas. The three areas are user’s experience, technology, and the business and in the center of it all is the product manager. Really what all that means is that you are balancing very different needs of the user experiences needs and problems with the needs of the business and then also bouncing that with the technology and the people who are building and creating that particular product. Product management is one of those things that a lot of people have heard about but not necessarily know exactly what that means.And then we talk a little bit more about how product management evolved over the last 60 or 70 years to where we are now. With that is understanding that people’s individual parts in product management aren’t necessarily direct. It comes down to product management is really about the fundamentals of understanding users and their problems and being able to solve them with a viable, sustainable, profitable product.
That takes us into checking to make sure you are on the right path. We talk about the problems and the questions that you need to ask about whether there is a market for that particular product. Product management is not so much about managing product but it’s actually about managing the people involved in your product. We go through a variety of different people you’ll be most likely working with such as developers and designers. And then we talk about marketing and sales and what tough jobs they have and understand that they each have their own interesting quirks. It’s important to understand that you are working with all different specialists and without them you’d never be able to achieve the product you have.
From there we go into thinking about success and failure. So even if you do the right things there is still always that chance that your product won’t succeed. There are a number of things to increase your chances of success but it doesn’t necessarily ensure success.
The last thing we cover in the book is time management which is one of these soft skills that is so important because you are juggling all these different things and you need to be able to organize yourself.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:05
“Good designers can take the complex and make it profoundly simple. Great designers will also stir your soul bewitch you with the beauty of their design.” – Jock Busuttil
I have been a product manager for over a decade and working in software for a few years longer. I have worked for a variety of different companies over the years ranging from small startups to huge multinational corporates and learned a great deal along the way. More recently I decided to branch out on my own and now running my own product management consultancy called Product People.
This was the book I wanted most myself when I was starting out in product management. Most of the books that were available told you about how to go about doing it but it didn’t tell you what it was really like. This book was a way for me to tell my story to others from someone who has actually been through the process personally.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Buy The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management by Jock Busuttil on Amazon today
Visit iManageProducts.uk to read more articles by Jock on his blog
Follow Jock Busuttil on LinkedIn and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch
Disruption by Design by Paul Paetz
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Crossing the Chasm according to Geoffrey Moore: Introduction In this episode Geoffrey Moore shares all his insights on his bestselling book, CrossingRead More
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]]>In this episode Geoffrey Moore shares all his insights on his bestselling book, Crossing the Chasm, where he discusses his revised and updated expertise on marketing and selling disruptive products to mainstream customers.
In his book Moore provides dozens of successful high-tech marketing examples, his in-depth research on technology adoption models for high-tech consumers, and many new marketing strategies that are specifically built for bring high-tech products to larger markets. The goal of the book is to help you master the Technology Adoption Life cycle and accelerate your marketing efforts.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are selling high-tech products that are new the market and need help broaden their marketing efforts to cover all segments of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle.
Most of the books in high-tech marketing understood that there were early adopters but they hadn’t recognized that there was this chasm separating the early adopters from everybody else. And as a result they thought they could just transition across very smoothly but in fact we lost many high-tech startups to the chasm.
I designed the book to be read from front to back.
The notion that when you are crossing the chasm you have to show up with a complete solution. The only way that is really feasible is if you specialize in one particular use case. So it’s the idea of pick a single use case and make sure it’s one that’s very urgent and compelling.
The key thing of the first part of the book is that we use a framework called the Technology Adoption Life Cycle to help entrepreneurs understand how high-tech markets develop. The key idea that we insert into it is this chasm idea which is the early adopting market really aligns with the entrepreneur very voluntarily. And the chasm then separates them from the rest of the marketplace which is more skeptical and pragmatic. So the strategy for marketing high-tech changes dramatically when it’s time to cross the chasm.
The last 2/3 of the book puts out a playbook and it’s organized around five key principles, there are five chapters in the playbook. The first chapter is when you cross the chasm you have to go initially to a very targeted niche market of people who have a very urgent and compelling use case for your new technology. The next thing you have to do is sit down and work through the target customer and the compelling reason to buy.
That lets you go to the third chapter in this book which is called Symbol the Invasion Force. The idea here is to bring together the other partners in the ecosystem that are necessary to work with you in order to solve that use case that the target customer has.
Once you have that then you can go to what we call Define the Battle which is the fourth of these chapters. And that is who is your competition and how are you positioned differently?
The last one is launching the invasion which has to do with your distribution strategy and your pricing strategy and how to pull that together to make that work.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:01
“First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” – Geoffrey Moore
I have an academic background originally; I was going to be a professor of English. But back in the 70’s I moved out to California, joined a high-tech firm, and been involved in tech marketing and high tech strategy since 1978. In the late 80’s I worked with a company called Regis McKenna and it gave me a chance to write this book which originally came out in 1990-1991.It’s about marketing and selling products to mainstream customers.
It was that high-tech firms would have experience of having early success with a handful of customers who were very enthusiastic about their disruptive innovation and that would make them think that they were ready to pour on the gas. And it just felt like the marketing kept on collapsing underneath them every time and this happened often enough that we knew we needed to find a solution and tell others about it.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Regis Touch by Regis McKenna
Buy Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore on Amazon today
Visit GeoffreyAMoore.com to learn more about Geoff and his book
Follow Geoffrey Moore on Twitter and LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr
Pocket Man by Scott Jordan
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make With Marketing and Branding
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Customer Experience 3.0 according to John A. Goodman: Introduction In this episode John Goodman takes a deep dive into his book, CustomerRead More
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]]>In this episode John Goodman takes a deep dive into his book, Customer Experience 3.0, where he shares his high-profit strategies in the age of techno service.
In his book Goodman provides a roadmap to enhance the customer service experience by using the best tools and strategies available today. The goal of this book is to teach you how to create an effective customer access strategy, use customer feedback properly to enhance your product, improve your marketing efforts, and use CRM systems and other tools to deliver customer satisfaction.
This book is for entrepreneurs who struggle to take advantage of and properly manage the customer service tools that are available on the market today.
We find that everyone talks about customer service and customer experiences really good because you’ll win more customers but there is no quantification done in a way that finance guys will ever agree to. The book is aimed heavily at how to quantify the payoff of better service and quality and customer experience in a way finance will actually accept. Another difference is that all the new technology has now allowed one to deliver great service and wow the customer at very low expense. We focus on the financial implication and how one intelligently implements technology.
You can jump in and out but to give yourself the ammunition you need to get finance and marketing to really invest with you it makes sense to read it from front to back.
It would be that the revenue and word of mouth implications of a better customer experience are 10 to 20 times the cost required to achieve it. So you are guaranteed 1,000% return if you do your quantification in the right way.
The first chapter is Why Good Service Might Not Result in a Great Experience and that’s about knocking down all the myths that everybody brings to the customer experience arena.
The second chapter is about how service is more than people. It’s more than smiling and being courteous. There has to be really good processes because most of your staff are implementing processes and if they’re constrained by that then they are backed into the corner oh well sir I’d like to do that but I can’t because. This is basically setting the stage that you need to have technology and processes that support the people.
The third chapter is about winning over the chief financial officer. In this chapter we show how you can quantify not only the revenue payoff of better service and quality but also word of mouth because successful companies have very positive word of mouth.
Chapter four is about how to deliver a product right the first time which entails setting proper customer expectations.
The next step after delivering the product is getting the customer to reach out to you if they have problems.
The sixth chapter is when someone comes to you for service you want to be sure that you satisfy them. Two things that most frontline staff lacks are flexibility and clear believable explanations.
The seventh chapter is Listen Passionately which is creating a unified voice of the customer. Most organizations say the voice of the customer are their surveys and their complaints but there are two other sources of data that are critically important and in many cases more powerful. The operational data internal to the company is going to tell you hours before the customers do. The fourth piece is the employee input because employees know real time and in many cases in advance what is going to happen. So we find that these data sources integrated in such a way that they create the economic imperative for action make a voice of the customer system that is dramatically more powerful than the average company has.
The last three chapters of the book focus on three key implementation issues where I see everyone is driven nuts. The first one is taming technology and here we have come up with a number of mechanisms for how the costumer experience area can play nicely with the IT department. I suggest how 10 different technologies can be used to enhance the customer experience.
The ninth chapter focuses on empowering the frontline staff and creating emotional connection with the customer. This chapter looks at a lot at training and incentives but the most critical factor that doesn’t work well in most corporations is the supervisor. The role of the supervisor is not catching people doing things wrong its recognizing people for doing things right.
The final chapter is about surviving as the customer experience leader. In this chapter I suggest seven roles that a customer experience leader should be performing and two that they should be avoiding because they are keys to disaster.
“No news is not necessarily good news.” – John A. Goodman
I am an engineer by trade and have been in this business for about 40 years. We started out doing research for the government and since then have worked with about 45 of the fortune 100 and a bunch of nonprofits in 17 countries around the world. We have worked literally in every industry enhancing customer service and the customer experience.
In 2009 I had written a book, Strategic Customer Service, which was how companies needed to array their operations to deliver really good customer service. In the last five years I saw technology coming in in so many areas that I felt I needed to update it.
In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Jan Carlzon
Buy Customer Experience 3.0 by John Goodman on Amazon today
Visit CustomerCareMC.com to learn more about John and download the national rage study
Follow John A Goodman on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Moving Targets by Gabriel Aluisy
Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Selfish Scared and Stupid according to Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory: Introduction In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take aRead More
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]]>In this episode Kieran Flanagan and Don Gregory take a deep dive into their book, Selfish Scared and Stupid, where they demystify the behaviors behind the failure and success of business ideas.
In their book, Flanagan and Gregory will help you design your business effectively with strategies to understand why the public fails to engage with your brand and why your product is falling short. The goal of the book is to teach you product survival tactics, how to offer customer strategic reward programs, how to turn fear into action, and how to make products hard to resist.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling to get their product or service engaged with the public and need a proven system to increase their customer reach and sales.
We have been told that it was funny which our intent wasn’t to be necessarily funny but human beings are funny by nature. It’s real and it’s not speaking to ideas but instead its dealing with what is true and real for human beings.
This book is a fairly easy read and written in the order that you would approach an engagement program. It probably works best read in order but I have had people say to me that they dip in and out as well.
We need to design for success rather than just hoping for the best and relying on short term strategies. It’s also about swimming with the current of human nature because if we don’t we get exhausted, we go nowhere and we often give up.
We start the book off explaining why we really need to be thinking selfish, scared and stupid. We make the distinction between acting selfish, scared and stupid which is human beings default position. It is why we survived, thrived and evolved as a species and ended up in this dominant position on the planet and it’s just that they don’t sounds like particularly good things. We tend to deny those things in our decision making but our primitive brains still drive a lot of our decision making. The survival thinking drives the fundamental thinking beneath our decision making.
From there we move on to how to do it. We section the book into think selfish, think scared, think stupid and dive into each of those points. Thinking selfish is fundamentally about coming from a place of what’s in it for them, and we need to move from what’s in it for me to what’s in it for them. So often in business we see that people are so caught up in what’s in it me. This section is about how to understand the extraordinary power of flipping your mindset to how you can filter the world constantly into what’s in it for someone else. And by doing that you can engage your staff with not only your goals but there’s as well.
In think scared the reality is that fear drives us a lot of the time. We look at how to flip that fear that has a stay in inaction to how to create a fear of not taking action. It’s about minimizing the fear of action and maximizing the fear of in action. So what we look to do is how to make change seem less fearful and part of the way we do it is by linking it to the known. Thinking scared isn’t about making people afraid, it’s about understanding how fear drives us and making sure that fear is on the appropriate side of the ledger in terms of stimulating action.
Then we look at thinking stupid and for a lot of people this is the most challenging one. Again it’s not about being stupid, it’s about thinking stupid and what that means is looking for the most easy way to achieve an outcome. It’s about making sure that our tasks are really easy and how to reduce resistance to those tasks. We spend a lot of time on why failure happens and how to make failure difficult. Instead of relying on these ideas, relying on short term strategies, the fundamental idea of the book is how we design for success.
“We are all selfish, scared and stupid.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
“Make failure difficult.” – Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory
We have a long history in advertising and spent a long part of our lives getting a better understanding of what drives human behavior. Most of our careers have been in entrepreneurial startups and our interests are in what drives human behavior. We have a business called The Impossible Institute which is a research, innovation, and think tank where we look at the gap in what people say they do and what they actually do. In that gap we find interesting stuff about how to motivate, how to get results, and how to help entrepreneurs.
We saw so much inspiration around what was driving human behavior and so much of it was based on ideas. What we wanted to do was step back and take a look at what was really driving human beings and generating results.
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Buy Selfish Scared and Stupid by Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory on Amazon today
Visit TheImpossibleInstitute.com to learn more about the book
Follow Kieran Flanagan on Twitter and Facebook
Follow Dan Gregory on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez | Traction: A Startup Guide To Getting Customers by Justin Mares | Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers | 5 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>Latest Books for Entrepreneurs in November 2014 The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in November 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authorsRead More
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]]>Latest Books for Entrepreneurs in November 2014
The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in November 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authors are in line to share their insights with me. Stay tuned this month for the release of the interviews with these great books and the authors.
This provocative book is built on the idea that businesses must return to a more human engagement methodology in order to succeed. It is an informative read for anyone interested in improving influence, growing business reach, improving sales figures or understanding the complexities of human behavior.
Behavioral strategists Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan argue that if you want to increase your chances of success in business and life, you should design for reality. Offering real-world strategies with a healthy dose of wit and charm, Selfish, Scared & Stupid will help you design for success by aligning with natural human behaviors: selfishness, fear and stupidity.
Learn how the survival of the species plays into business, including delusional realities and the reasons ideas can fail. Discover how to offer customers strategic rewards, thereby making the buying process more attractive to selfish natures. Examine the link between fear and the unknown, including strategies for quelling fears and turning them into action.
“SSS is a triumph, a great read, stunning insights and the title had me laughing at myself and learning at the same time. It makes me want to be a better man–generous, courageous and intelligent!” – Matt Church, Founder of Though Leaders Global and author of Amplifiers
“Clever, rigorous and refreshingly real–this fad-free book shows modern-day realists how to unlock real results.” – Dr Jason Fox, Motivational Scientist and author of The Game Changer
Learn more about Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory | Buy Selfish, Scared, and Stupid on Amazon
Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products.
Hooked provides readers with:
Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.
“A must-read for everyone who cares about driving customer engagement.” — Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup
“Hooked gives you the blueprint for the next generation of products. Read Hooked or the company that replaces you will.” – Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress
Learn more about Nir Eyal or listen to his own deep dive into the book | Buy Hooked on Amazon
Join double-decade, quarter-billion-dollar Couple CEO Heidi and Scott Shimberg, as they explore the intricacies and intimacies of living and loving life as an entrepreneurial couple.
Couple CEO addresses the specific challenges facing you as a team and as partners with actionable lifestyle advice, proven business management strategies, and colorful guidance that answer questions like: How can you put the spark back in your relationship and make sure it stays lit? How do you live a life where your business and relationship coexist and thrive?
The challenges as a couple are unique. Couple CEOs often struggle to create balance between growing their business, enjoying a happy family, and living a healthy lifestyle. This book is great for any couple engaged in growing a business together, but also a valuable read for any couple creating a life together.
Learn more about Heidi and Scott Shimberg or listen to their deep dive into the book | Buy Couple CEO on Amazon
Drawing on her experience of great adversity–and even greater success—Patricia Walsh shows you how to set realistic milestones and describes a simple and effective process for mapping these milestones to daily tasks that will help you achieve what you previously thought unachievable.
In Blind Ambition, Walsh both inspires and educates by relating her unforgettable personal story while detailing her proven Fuel / Fire / Blaze approach to achieving any goal:
“Patricia Walsh lays out an extremely effective framework for achieving your highest goals–in business and in life. I have personally seen Patricia apply this approach to great success at Microsoft. Anyone who reads this book will be that much closer to achieving their goals.” — Steven Sinofsky, former president of the Windows division at Microsoft Corporation
Learn more about Patricia Walsh | Buy Blind Ambition on Amazon
Whether you’re a recent college graduate faced with a difficult job market, an ambitious entrepreneur trying to anticipate the Next Big Thing, or a struggling executive weathering a storm of constant global change, this book will guide you through anything the world throws at you.
This powerful book by Drucker scholar and author Bruce Rosenstein incorporates the master’s time-tested principles into a step-by-step daily plan that will change your life forever. Starting right now, you can:
“Rosenstein has opened the door to an important and often misunderstood area of Drucker’s work–why an understanding of the future is so critical for our development as leaders. It confirms my belief of a bright future ahead.” — Frances Hesselbein, President and CEO, The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute
Learn more about Bruce Rosenstein | Buy Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way on Amazon
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]]>Things you should know about Hooked according to Nir Eyal Introduction In this episode, Nir Eyal shares his book Hooked where he teaches you why very few products see successRead More
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]]>Things you should know about Hooked according to Nir Eyal
In this episode, Nir Eyal shares his book Hooked where he teaches you why very few products see success and what makes consumers engage with certain products out of habit.
In his book, Eyal gives you a four-step process for figuring out exactly what you should build into your product to make it better than the rest. The goal of Hooked is to have your products bring consumers back continuously without depending on costly advertising and messaging.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are having troubles creating or getting a product to stick and need actionable steps for building products people love.
I couldn’t find that book out there that told me what resources and tools I could use to figure out what I should build into my product.
If you are working on the kind of product that requires repeat engagement then you need to have what I call the complete hook, a four step process to creating customer habits. However, even If you are building a one-time use service there is still a lot that you can learn from consumer psychology by understanding these deeper reasons that people do what they do and I believe you can get the outline of that by jumping in and out of the book. I really hope that the reader gets to the end because I believe that there is a lot here that can help people save a lot of time and energy in building their businesses.
The one principle I would want the reader to take out of the book is that your behavior is designed.
The book follows this model that I call The Hook which is basically a design pattern. It’s something that I found in my years of research that is in all sorts of habit forming products. So my research revealed this four step process which I detail throughout the chapters of the book.
The first step in The Hook is The Trigger phase. The trigger phase is something that cues the user to action; it’s what prompts the habit. These triggers come in two types, internal triggers and external triggers. External triggers are things in our environment that tells us what to do next. This is what most people think of when they think about cues to action. Internal triggers are these things that prompt the user to action and there information for what to do next is actually in the users head. So what people do when they are in a particular situation, routine or when they feel certain emotions this dictates what they do next. If your company can attach to these negative emotions, this is where habits are formed. It’s absolutely critical that if you want to build a habit forming product you have to figure out what that internal trigger is.
The next step of The Hook is The Action phase. The action phase is the simplest behavior that the user does in anticipation of a reward. If you can make a behavior easier to do you are more likely to get that behavior to occur.
Then the next chapter is about variable rewards. It turns out that at the heart of all sorts of habit forming products you will find a variable reward. I details three critical types of variable rewards found in all sorts of habit forming products both online and offline.
Finally, the last step of The Hook is The Investment phase. It’s the part of the hook that I find most companies neglect as well as where there is the most room for growth and opportunity. It turns out that this phase is absolutely critical in bringing users back and it’d defined as the step where the user does a bit of work to increase the likelihood of them returning. I detail how you can ask people to invest in the product so that they can come back in the future whereas the product gets better the more it gets used.
At the end of the book I give some case studies and I profile an app that’s one of the most successful apps in the world, the bible app and I detail how this app uses the principles of consumer psychology to keep people coming back to use it. I also talk about the morality of manipulation, that if you’re using consumer psychology to change people’s behavior, I offer up a guide for how to use this responsibly.
“Hooked gives you the blueprint for the next generation of products. Read Hooked or the company that replaces you will.” –Matt Mullenweg
I’ve started two tech companies and after my last company was acquired I dove into the more academic side of consumer psychology and habit formation which is what I’ve been working on for the past three years.
I was at my last company and was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my customers weren’t doing the behaviors that I designed for them to do. I wanted to dive deeper into consumer psychology, into the things that people are not able to necessarily articulate and yet predictably drive their behavior. So I couldn’t find that book out there that told me what resources and tools I could use to figure out what I should build into my product.
Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
Buy Hooked on Amazon today
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Related books: Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg | Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
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