#book-club on Hooked by Nir Eyal

[Colin Pokowitz]

Thanks everyone for coming out! 

Participants:

- John Berryman

- Colin Pokowitz

- George Livingston

- Nick Chouard

- Shaw Kagawa

Notes can be found here. 

My final notes: I really enjoyed this discussion. Seeing things from these different lenses of habit building in the personal life, vs. a community, vs. an application really brought some new ideas to light. My biggest takeaway was that the Hooked Model is so fluid and open to interpretation, and it can be done in so many different ways. There's not simply one way to build a new habit in a product but rather an infinite number of ways. 

Video of the conversation posted soon, feel free to send in some closing thoughts as well! :D

[John Berryman]

It was great chatting with Colin and the other invitees, about the Hooked. For me this was a real timely book to read since I'm working on building a hopefullly habit-forming AND beneficial startup with Penny University. The discussion served as a great way to dig back into the content of the book and examine what I learned with the new perspective of other readers. Among the 5 attendees there were 3 startups represented, so we were all thinking about how to apply the lessons learned from the book.

The underlying principle of the Hooked model is that habits are formed in a loop of 4 things: triggers that make you think of the action -> actually doing the action -> reaping the reward -> and making investment into the habit. My key takeaway from the book and the conversation is that Penny University has a lot of these things, but we are notably missing the trigger. Effectively we're depending upon the Slack icon's red dot to pull people back into the platform. If we want to "grow up" a bit, it would be nice to find a way to encourage people to set up chats, get involved in existing chats, and write followups. In doing this, people will reap the reward and hopefully complete the circle by further investing in the platform by organizing more conversations. We will start rolling out some new features in the coming weeks that might fit the bill here. Will they be habit forming? Time will tell, and YOU can also tell me! Do you have any ideas about how we should engage people on Penny U?

I left the meeting early, but Colin's last question was for other good reads in the field of habit formation. If we're in the vein of "habit forming products", I think [Casey Winter's post about "product loops"](https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops) is a must-read. I worked with Casey for a bit at Eventbrite, but Casey's claim to fame is his growth work he did with Pinterest. The post linked there is about habit forming, but instead of on the individual level, it's about shaping an application so that habits are formed on a societal level. How can you create a positive feedback loop in social networks that draw more people into a service.

Thanks Colin for organizing! And thanks everyone for a fruitful discussion.

[Colin Pokowitz]

Here's the video as promised! https://youtu.be/NlXYfBsCII0

[Nick Chouard]

Thanks so much for organizing, Colin! I enjoyed this discussion. The book definitely helped me to frame how we can use the Hooked model in building Penny U. It provides an excellent framework for pulling users into your product not just once, but over and over. The action steps that are provided at the end of each chapter really helped solidify this for me.