Remember how difficult it was to get your first customer? If that wasn’t already hard enough, you also have to retain them.

The key to making customers stick is habit, according to Nir Eyal, author of the best-selling book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

“Imagine what would happen to your business if you could get people to use your product out of habit, without having to spend all that money on expensive advertising or spam messaging,” Eyal shared during a session at Product Development Conference 2021.

(If you want to catch more insightful sessions just like this, our early bird sale for tickets to PDC 2023 is on! The event will feature CPOs of Grab, Figma, ShopBack, and many more.)

As the title of his book suggests, there’s a strategy to establishing habitual behavior – what Eyal calls the “Hook model.”

The model starts with the trigger, which asks companies to understand their customers’ motivations. For example, someone who’s bored may automatically visit YouTube to watch videos that entertain them – that’s an internal trigger, which means the user is likely hooked into taking action.

Photo credit: Nir Eyal

“If you can’t articulate [your customers’ internal triggers], you’re just getting lucky – you’re flying blind,” he says.

This eventually leads to the next two stages: action and reward. Using a product needs to have the right balance between motivation and ease – the less motivation a customer has to take an action, the easier it must be for them to accomplish it.

Of course, every action needs to have a reward, whether intrinsic or extrinsic. The most important thing across all of them, however, is variability.

“The point is to give users what they came for and scratch that itch, but have a little uncertainty around what they might find the next time they engage with your product or service,” he explains. That way, customers will always be enticed to find out if there’s something new in store for them.

Last but not least, users need to be able to reap the rewards of investing in your product. The more someone uses your product, the more value it should generate for them. For instance, someone who’s built a following of 50,000 people on Twitter would engage with the platform a lot more than someone with only 50 followers.

All that being said, retaining customers is just one aspect of a very long list in product development. There’s tons of other things to consider too, such as design, marketing, and coding the back end, to name just a few.

Every single topic has so much depth and complexity to it, and being proficient at all of them isn’t just necessary for building great products, but also great companies too.

That’s why we’ve put together something that will help you achieve both breadth and depth in your product management skills: Product Development Conference 2023, where we’ll be gathering the region’s top experts to speak about every aspect of product management.

If being a master of product development is your goal, PDC 2023 is the place to be.