First Rule of Building A Sticky Product - Daily Laterals #6

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Welcome to Day 6 of Daily Laterals - a race against myself to see who crumbles first: my will to write daily shorts like these or time itself.

Daily Laterals (weekends not included) covers a short concept/idea I’m currently thinking about or thoughts on a piece of information I’ve recently read.

It’s meant to sprinkle a bit of food for thought next to all the brainrot.

The First Rule

Build a product that tells the user they are doing a great job.

AI is a notorious yes man. It’s actually a pretty big problem. I’ve personally met way too many people who told me they “validated their idea with AI”, which is like saying “my parrot agrees to everything I say”.

It does that to keep you hooked. Duolingo and Whoop do it too, every calorie tracking app does that as well.

It’s great for user retention, but horrible for the user if they actually start believing those apps.

Duolingo has a language learning problem. Despite it being a great app, its incentive is user engagement & retention, not the number of languages you learn.

Whoop also wants to make you feel good about yourself so you keep using the app.

If your product shames users that are doing a bad job (spoiler: most of your users will be bad at using your product in the beginning), you’re going to struggle with retention & adoption.

These are not necessarily bad things. It’s good to feel good about yourself. But don’t think that these apps or services are telling you the unfiltered truth.

Garmin is notorious for being super tough on their users and it’s become something of an inside joke.

I bet they’d trade that inside joke in a heartbeat to increase retention by 10% though.

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