Hacking Behavior: Going Beyond Growth Hacking

Hacking Behavior: Going Beyond Growth Hacking(kyrobeshay.com)

43 points by micrypt 13 years ago | 8 comments

avneeshk91 13 years ago |

First of all, fantastic post. This really highlights an increasing problem in which product developers are focused more on product usage analytics than they are each user's personal experience with the product.

I think there is another way of looking at your Phase 2 though. Your goal is to make your product so good that you can't imagine using anything else. If your product is really that good, I'm not sure that consistent reinforcement is actually necessary. Rather, your product should be so good that users stop using it consciously.

I think one of the best examples of this is Google's search engine. The product itself is so good, and has proved itself so consistently over the years, that most people don't think of using anything else for search. In fact, most people don't think of "searching" at all. I can't count the number of times that I end up on a Google search results page, not realizing that I had gone through the mental thought process of "I need to search for something. I'm going to go to Google, execute a search query, and find what I'm looking for in the results."

Going from thought to results without any significant reinforcements from the product (other than it simply being a great product) is in my opinion, the true sign of a user experience done right.

Retric 13 years ago | |

It's drivel, Users are worth whatever money you can extract from them. You can make a million a month from 100 thousand of them or 100 million of them, it's just a question of your monetization strategy. If your product needs someone to change their behavior over time then that's a bad thing. Mitigation strategy's include such things as focusing on when people are most open to change, new job, new home, new baby etc.

PS: You can actually learn a lot from how Banks operate as people move more often than they change banks. Keep the costs hidden, and the barriers to change obvious.

wildermuthn 13 years ago |

"Make your productive addictive . . . '

Please, don't.

I want you to solve my problem, not create another one. I want to visit your website once, or perhaps twice, and never have to visit it again, because you've solved a real-life problem that led me to your site in the first place.

rdudekul 13 years ago |

Great post. Growth hacking I believe includes behavior hacking, both ultimately leading to creating a strong scalable sales funnel. In essence every startup out there has to be good at creating a solid pitch (pre-sell), then building a solid product (feedback/refine) and then incentivizing users (hacking behavior) to convert. Rewarding users may involve some level of gamification built into the product.

I am excited to see how this new interest in Growth Hacking is allowing a lot of in-depth thinking around combining marketing and coding to create dramatically better results.

AznHisoka 13 years ago |

This is all well and good, but how you gonna get all those users whose behavior you want to hack? That's the hard part. If you don't have a way to get those guinea pigs, everything else doesn't matter.

mr_november 13 years ago | |

It's talked about in the post - that's the domain of growth hacking and there is plenty of resources for that out there (see patio11 to start). The area of retention (which is one way you could look at this 'behaviour hacking') is one that is often ignored and one could say it's even more important than acquisition.

Great post.

j45 13 years ago |

Love the post, I'm not sure if the title fits, but it absolutely fits the situation I'm facing, and the introduction to the Transtheoretical model is really appreciated.

Is anyone else building a product that converts people when you tell them about it, solves a real problem, but they aren't actively searching for because they don't know a solution is technologically possible?

marmaduke 13 years ago |

This is the worst analogy I have ever read. I am convinced the author either did not understand the models to which he/she provided links, or worse, did not even read the words on the Wikipedia pages themselves.

To wit, none of the commenters here touched on this analogy.

F-, would not use this analogy evar.