Understand Products Better— a Trigger Theory

— — — -This article serves as my daily product thoughts — — — — -

Triggers in the product world

It is often challenging for product people to understand products from the user perspective. The author of hooked provides a “trigger theory”, which I think offers a structured way of thinking of the fundamental reasons why a user uses a particular product. The reason why I think it’s important is that, tech industry people really prefer jargons like “product market fit” and they rarely go deeper from there, even for the entrepreneurs who created successful products (many of them call the moment of product market fit a magical moment, but why it happened in the first place?) It is very hard for me to buy simple ideas such as “retention is high because people love it”. Therefore, today I will try to lay out hooked’s trigger theory, which I think will be an important building block of the a product’s life journey.

External Triggers

External triggers are acquisition/referral/retention tools that products usually rely on, and those are straight-forward, easy-to-implement, copyable ideas. Thus we can see whenever a newly designed external trigger turned out successful, it soon becomes the industry norm.

1.Paid Triggers

The purpose of paid triggers is to get users’ attention and prompt them to download the app/perform certain key steps. This category includes advertising, search engine marketing, direct payments, etc. Think of Alipay’s red pockets during every spring festival, Uber’s $30/hour guaranteed payments to drivers in the early days, etc.. Paid triggers are essential to Acquisition and Activation in the AARRR model. For most products, it is the first trigger individual users encounter. And it’s expensive — when a company has higher cost of acquisition (CAC) than competitors, then you know it’s relying more heavily on paid triggers.

2. Earned Triggers

Earned Triggers include favorable press mentions, hot viral videos, featured app store placements. Therefore, their impact on user acquisitions are minimal unless a product has already gained traction. The more popular a product is, the higher effectiveness earned triggers can be, and effective earned triggers can bring down CAC, as they can acquire users at no cost.

3. Relationship Triggers

Product referrals, word of mouth, and others are examples of relationship triggers. Relationship triggers are what entrepreneurs and investors always striving and hoping for because they are the best leading signals of a product’s future success, thus unlike paid triggers and earned triggers, they earned the place of a single category called “Referral” in the AARRR model.

4. Owned Triggers

Owned Triggers are notifications on your phone, spam emails, text notifications, etc.. Users won’t receive owned triggers unless they have apps downloaded or accounts/email/phone numbers registered. Thus, owned triggers are not part of the Acquisition step, and instead falls into the Retention Category. That’s why apps like Quora and Zhihu, though allowing you to use the web version, constantly ask you to download the app so that they can shoot you notifications (owned triggers).

Internal Triggers

Internal triggers can be said as the core value propositions of a habit-forming product. Unlike external triggers, which use sensory stimuli, you can’t see, touch or hear an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. Connecting internal triggers with a product is the brass ring of habit-forming technology.

1.Boredom

2. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

Most of the successful social apps today are built upon FOMO. I think a very good case study is Snapchat vs. Instagram Stories feature. Snapchat’s success is partly of driven by FOMO, but not entirely — Snapchat also tries to make sure receivers cannot use screenshots, save photos/videos without noticing creators, and therefore Snapchat’s core value proposition is a combination of FOMO, privacy, and ease of content creation. On the other hand, Instagram Stories is a FOMO pure play, because Instagram does not notify creators whether their stories are saved or not. The fact that Instagram Stories also was a massive success demonstrates the power of FOMO. Users that used to check Instagram once every few days become daily users.

3.